Our lives are becoming increasingly elastic with businesses who empower our constantly changing lives as our greatest allies. Service relationships used to be agreed upon as strict packages measured in multi-year contracts with hefty cancellation fees. Mobile phones, insurance plans, and cable subscriptions – anything you couldn’t own outright, involved an ironclad, unchangeable contract. But that’s increasingly passé as businesses tap into the natural ebb and flow of consumer and business life. Namely, if you want to use, rent, or borrow something for a month, a week, or just this moment, an arrangement can be made.
Consistently Inconsistent
These new service relationships make sense when looking at how change is the only constant in our lives. A team can be rapidly growing a business one moment, freezing everything to handle a crisis at another, and then be back expanding at a breakneck pace, all in the same quarter. Naturally, they’d like their services to keep pace.
In our own personal lives, we can be traveling nonstop for what feels like weeks, then come back to a monotonous daily commute for two months. While all of this is going on, we always wonder to ourselves why we are paying for what we often don’t need and can’t increase what we need when we do need it. Why am I paying for utilities when I’m never home? Why can’t I increase my data plan for my phone without entering into another agreement? Why can’t I rent the office space I need, instead of these giant spaces that are available? These were all questions that challenged established businesses to change their perspective on service, and modernize their business models through innovation and flexibility.
Challenging the Status Quo
It’s been exciting to see how a challenge to the status quo has created new and interesting services that empower our lives to grow, contract, and experiment with more ease. From short-term apartment rentals around the world to pay-as-you-go car insurance, every seemingly inelastic service has become flexible and brought with it a growing following of people looking to plug in on their own terms.
With the popularity of the pay-as-you-go economy, it’s funny to look back at how companies once feared these business models because they thought short-term options would translate to short-term loyalty. But, as we’ve seen, when you empower people to make a choice, and they truly like your service, they’ll be back.
Read about TIBCO’s new service, launched today, that enables fast, flexible, ready-made integration for your key applications on the cloud or on-premise.
