I'm supposed to be in Europe this week to speak at a conference and attend another one, but I decided to stay home, to be safe. I am hearing all sorts of stories of events being called off and flights being canceled. It's estimated that the airline industry's 2020 revenues could go down by 40%, or over half a trillion dollars.

People are changing their behavior.

It is not easy to get people to change behavior. Typically it only happens when there is something really amazing or really awful stimulating it.

In this case, take the climate crisis. Clearly, transportation, including air travel, is a huge contributor to greenhouse gases. And while there is tangible progress particularly around EVs, there has not been large scale behavior change when it comes to transportation patterns, until now.

Of course, this may not last. Hopefully COVID-19 passes with time just like SARS and MERS and the Swine Flu did. And it's likely that, by and large, we return to our previous patterns.

But it's also possible that this episode causes some lasting change. Online video is amazingly good now, and is increasingly a viable substitute for certain kinds of in person meetings, or even an improvement, all things considered. For one thing, online/video meetings are much more accessible, meaning you can generally get a more interesting and diverse set of attendees than you can for IRL events. And, for less than the cost of a single plane ticket, you can outfit your desk with big huge monitors and a good camera (I just did this recently).

As such, it feels like one output of this situation will be a broader comfort with videoconferencing, and I think that's a good thing. It's certainly been good for the Zoom stock price.

But thinking more broadly, it just goes to show that change does not come cheap. And it often only comes by the force of something really powerful, either positive or negative.