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If investing were easy we'd all be rich, which we're not, so this is obviously a tough thing to do. Among the most striking trends of recent years is that one of the toughest parts of investing is actually getting tougher. Perhaps that's not the happiest news, though it's really interesting, and in any case it's reality -- and the advantage goes to those who face it soonest.

The part that's changing in a big way is the eternal quest to find companies that offer a reasonably predictable flow of future earnings. Finding such companies is of course a key component of value investing. That's why Warren Buffett has been such a big investor in companies like Coca-Cola, Wrigley, and Gillette -- their products satisfy very basic human wants that aren't going away, and the companies possess powerful brand names. With companies like these, value investors figure they can see reliable earnings years, even decades, into the future.

The trouble is that ever fewer companies can look forward to a serene future, for many reasons that are all related to our increasingly information-based economy.

Example: When compact discs first appeared in the early 1980s they cost $15.98. Prices have risen slowly but steadily, so that many CDs now cost $18.98, and some cost over $20. The major record companies spent all their energy slugging it out with one another. What they didn't foresee was a faceless, insurgent threat now called file-sharing. So many consumers are now getting music free by sharing it online that the world's largest record company, Universal Music, has just announced it will cut CD prices drastically, to $12.98 or less. Goodbye, I suspect, to steadily increasing profits.

It's easy to think of many other companies that have been blindsided by Internet-based competition: booksellers, travel agents, insurance agents who never imagined that some competitor they'd never even heard of could attack them with a fundamentally different business model. This is one of the most important features of the info-based economy: New, fundamentally different business models that undermine old ways of doing business.

It's happening across the economy, even in industries that don't seem to be information-based. You sell parts to the major automakers? They'll now use Net-based reverse auctions to squeeze your prices, telling you and several competing suppliers to get online at a particular date and time, then bid against each other for 20 minutes to see who will offer the lowest price on a given part. Even when your customers haven't adopted such cruelly efficient purchasing practices, they know far more than they used to about your products, services, and prices, and about those of your competitors.

It's obvious how any company will have a hard time cranking out long-term predictable earnings when innovations like these can drop out of the sky and disrupt any business model. But what about the great brands, the companies whose competitive advantage derives at least partly from the power and mystique of a name? How can information technology (or anything else) derail them?

In a few ways, it turns out. The Internet has enabled guerilla forces to coordinate attacks on big brands in ways that wouldn't have been possible before (as the attackers cheerfully admit). So we've seen McDonald's demonized around the world for various reasons, Nike attacked for labor practices, Shell besieged on human rights issues. Copying logos has become so precise and cheap that poachers readily steal them; it's easy to buy fake Cartier watches, fake Oakley sunglasses, even fake Marlboros.

Perhaps the most dangerous threat to brands is that in a media-drenched world, brand greatness seems to be getting more difficult to maintain. Consumers live in continual sensory overload. Walking into a firehose of competing messages, thousands every day, who can keep them all straight? Perhaps even more important, who really believes any of them anymore? We're exposed to more marketing messages in a week than our great-grandparents saw in a lifetime. We've seen it all -- every technique, strategem, and gimmick.

The sad result -- sad at least for investors -- is that even the greatest brands have been degraded. McDonald's competes on price. Coca-Cola, much vaunted as the world's greatest brand, can't charge a penny more than Pepsi. Marlboro finally had to cut prices a few years ago, a move that realigned the planets in the tobacco business.

Do you really want to bet your money that any company today can produce reliably increasing earnings for years into the future? That its business model won't be undermined by some unimagined competitor? That its brand can be maintained for decades?

I don't mean to suggest these things are impossible. But it seems clear they're much more difficult than they used to be, and that to the extent any company can do them, it will do them for shorter periods than in the past.

Should value investors still bother looking for such companies? Absolutely. But finding them will be harder. And once a promising candidate is found, it will require constant close watching.

In the infotech age, the days of buy-it-and-forget-it have become just a warm memory.