“Truth is whatever upsets the applecart."
For some it’s impossible to imagine: A time before Starbucks. Americans drank a lot of coffee back then, but they brewed at home, enjoying Folgers “Crystals” (what were those?) and Maxwell House. Things changed and coffee became a customer-centric business focused on quality and user experience. Now, with a record 40,000 coffee shops in the U.S., you specify and pay for exactly the coffee drink you want on your phone and have it waiting for you when you arrive.
The same shift reshaped one business after another, often with new technology as the lever. Buying a car, ordering food, listening to music, taking a flight, exercising with a trainer - all of these things are easy to access because the companies that provide them are now service platforms. For these firms and their customers, “the value proposition … matches the users’ needs.”
Real estate’s own journey from simply producing and owning buildings to a focus on providing services has been slow, a recent paper argues, and the “applecart” owners from the McLuhan quote should take lessons from what’s happening all around them.
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