[Sigia-l] Buy or rent?

[Listera]

Manu Sharma: 
> Since buy vs rent is an old problem and has little to do with
> technology, 

The exception here is, before digital, you generally took physical
possession of the 'rented' property. As in, moved into the new rented
apartment or drove the rented car. With digital stuff, you don't even get
that. You supposedly get 'access' to a million songs one day, the next day,
poof, you get nothing. It's one level of abstraction moved up.

> Can we rephrase the question as: How do you design systems that favor
> customer *loyalty*?

Nope, loyalty assumes active positive participation by the user. Stickiness
can display a level of 'evilness' where the determining force is lock-in. I
have a feeling that the 'rent' approach may encourage lock-in strategies.
  
> Stickiness, if it means doing everything you can to ensure users only
> use your service, is an evil goal ultimately even though it might seem
> to work well in the short term.

Yes. (In Napster's case, of course, they created the least 'compatible'
digital music system: one OS, one version of player app and a small set of
of players. :-)

> Of course, it might not work for everyone. What's critical here is to
> deliver exceptional value to users that they don't find anywhere else.

With the rent model, everyone generally having access to the same million or
so songs, this becomes problematic. Because nobody's going to subscribe to
multiple rent services; selectively downloading from multiple services is
more feasible.

Ziya
Nullius in Verba