Stuff Sucks

Stuff is so 20th century that it never ceases to amaze me how many people continue to cling to it like a drowning man clings to a life preserver. Companies will try New and Interesting things, but they'll do it only halfheartedly and they will fail; then they'll relapse into depending on stuff to save them the same way an alcoholic will fall back into the bottle in a moment of weakness.

Stuff sucks. Stuff is expensive. Stuff takes up space. Stuff is inconvenient. Stuff requires thousands of square feet of shelf space and a receiving dock that gets overfilled with stuff that never gets put away. George Carlin once said, "you ever notice how everyone else's stuff is shit and all of your shit is stuff?" Well, it's true. You have to pay to acquire stuff, you have to pay to turn stuff into the stuff you sell, and if something goes out of fashion or a new technology comes along, you're left with a bunch of stuff that nobody wants. Someone else can come along and reverse-engineer your stuff into identical stuff and sell it at 1/10th the price. There go your profits. Quick - vote in a new CEO who'll find new stuff for us to sell. You might argue that The Other Guy's stuff isn't as good as your stuff, but your customers honestly don't care. If you think buying American is the only way to get top-notch stuff, then you should smash your computer to bits with a sledgehammer: the computer was probably assembled in China with parts made in Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore. The sledgehammer was also probably made in Taiwan; best to smash it to bits with your feet, and then disinfect your lacerated soles with Betadine distilled in the UK and gauze woven in India. If the Chinese can figure out how to make a hard drive, they can probably figure out how to make a sprocket or a bushing; hell, even the new Cessna Skycatcher is manufactured overseas. Welcome to the new reality:

Stuff sucks.

Knowledge doesn't.

Businesses have, since the dawn of the industrial age, been defined by the products they make and the fashion in which those products are brought to market. Establishing these mechanisms and controlling how they operated are the endeavours that defined them. Carmakers made and sold cars. Aircraft companies made and sold aircraft. Newspaper companies printed and sold newspapers. A company created walls about itself through its products - "we are what we make."

So who wants stuff? Ryan Aeronautical wanted stuff. North American Aviation wanted stuff. More independent industrial distributors than can easily be counted wanted stuff. How many of these companies survived? Changing market demands - in the case of the aerospace OEMs, the end of World War II; in the case of industrial distributors, any one of a number of market contractions that forced mass rollups every 20 years or so - all but doomed these companies to irrelevance and, ultimately, death. Stuff is limiting. Ink is old the minute it dries. Stuff doesn't adapt and change to suit your customer's needs. Customers can't click your stuff to learn about new stuff, and the other guy's stuff can't offer them that, either. You can't forward stuff to a friend. Have you ever tried posting a sprocket or a new car on your Facebook page? Doesn't work too well. Stuff doesn't differentiate Bob from Sue or Larry from Charley, save by paint scheme and interior options. Your stuff is his stuff is her stuff is their stuff. To make ourselves feel better, we try to make our stuff unique (one of the few reasons why companies that sell 6" exhaust pipes for naturally-aspirated Honda Civics remain in business), just like everybody else. Everyone's selling the same stuff to the same people, and everyone wonders why their stuff isn't selling when it's so plainly obvious that it is infinitely superior to everyone else's stuff. That which makes us different becomes that which makes us all the same.

Consider Amazon. Jeff Bezos didn't build a better stuff company; he didn't build a better bookstore or a better retail front. Amazon holds virtually zero inventory, purchases stock as needed, and has an overhead that few companies that have expanded past the parent's garage can match. Bezos built digital equity. Bezos built trust among Amazon's customers. He did this by empowering others. Amazon sells retail space to small merchants; Amazon Web Services is sometimes the entire back-end of a technology company; Mechanical Turk created a flexible labour market.

Amazon decided what business it was in (digital knowledge and online services, for those who are a bit slow). AOL did not; it thought it was in the content business, and the merger with Time Warner was one of the most-ridiculed events in modern business. Yahoo! thought it was in the content business, and it too, failed. I'm not even sure Yahoo! still knows what business it's actually in, and Flickr might be the only saving grace that keeps it from imploding.

Transitioning from stuff to binary is a really scary thing, especially for manufacturers, engineering companies, distributors, and other entities that have been built on stuff since before electric light bulbs were science fiction. These types of companies are the epitome of the stuff empire: stuff is packed with more stuff, other stuff is burned to deliver the stuff from A to B, and still more stuff is needed to house the original stuff as it waits for sale. But these are also the ideal candidates for transition to the knowledge empire. Are industrial distributors repositories for stuff, or solution facilities? Are airlines molecular transonic relocation companies, or aerial logistics communities? Are manufacturers stuff cutters or dream facilitators?

Welcome to Business 2.0, where the customer is not only smarter than you are, but more likely to be far less loyal without some openness on your part and some demonstrable willingness to help.

Time to have an identity crisis.

Source: http://trinityaeromotive.blogspot.com/2010/08/stuff-sucks.html

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