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Hackable business models

IN THE OLD DAYS (before I got my driver’s license), you would buy your Skoda with a thick manual and when things went wrong later – and they did – there was a LOT you could do in your own backyard, using standard tools, to make your car operational again. One of very few advantages of communism: the cars were so simple you didn’t have to be a mechanic to understand them. The era produced many hackers.

Yes, like my my dad who built half of my parents’ house himself. And he is a piano teacher! Such were the times.

Fast-forward a quarter century, and the landscape is unrecognizable. Cars have so much electronics in their innards you can’t even replace your headlights yourself. Many don’t even know how to open their car’s hood, and if something breaks, it gets tossed away, not repaired.

If somebody was hibernated for a generation and just woke up, he could think we’ve gotten comfortable and lazy. But these advances in technology we’ve witnessed haven’t suppressed our imagination and curiosity: they have empowered it. You don’t repair your car because somebody else can do it better and cheaper, but you can put a Linux embedded system (carputer) in it and hack the traffic lights when you are in a real hurry (OK, I got carried away… but just a little).

Things we buy and use in everyday life (cellphones, coffee makers) are so potent we can devise other uses for them than the producer intended. And it doesn’t matter if the producer is OK with it or not: Apple’s iPhones is reportedly running its first Hello World! app. Apple shipped a dumb, closed-source device and the fashionistas will use it as such, but sure enough somebody will be running Apache on it very soon.

This poses a challenge to companies who have been used to having control over the things they put on the market. They can’t know for sure if their business model won’t be changed – hacked – from the outside. Which makes inviting, not discouraging, your customers to participate the only sensible approach.

July 30, 2007 | Filed Under CRM 

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