Accessing Trumps Owning
Several companies have recently announced new subscription-based services: gaming (Google, Apple), video streaming (Apple, Disney), and news (Apple News). On a different plane, software is definitely trending towards a subscription model, which makes sense from a business model point of view.
In his book The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future , Kevin Kelly explains that “access is so superior to ownership in many ways that it is driving the frontiers of the economy. (…) In the coming 30 years the tendency toward the dematerialized, the decentralized, the simultaneous, the platform enabled, and the cloud will continue unabated. (…) For most things in daily life, accessing will trump owning.1”
- Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, p. 131. ↩