Services to the Rescue!

When we hear about most successful companies today, what are the first names which come to our minds ? Google, Facebook, Oracle, Microsoft ...

What do they all have in common ? Well, they all produce software products, places where coding geeks work. Close answer, but still not it! They all produce services to people and none of them producing (manufacturing) anything material !!

Service industry is having a good time at the expense of the manufacturing industries!

Let's take a seemingly counter example. Apple. Apple do provide many services like iTunes, App Store, Mac OS, iPhone OS and SDK etc  However, they are more widely known for their gadget devices. iPhone, iPod, iPad, MacBook Air, iMac etc all cool gadgets! What do they all have in common ? They all have replaced the need of few additional devices we have to carry on with ourselves! They all have made us free from additional stuff by bundling many of them together and into a much smaller size as well. In effect, these gadgets have indeed reduced the total manufacturing which would have otherwise happen if they were not there! Just think about it.. MP3 players, laptops, phones, digital cameras, video game players, FM radios, Video CAM coders, GPS devices, alarm clocks, voice recorders.... we don't have to use all these devices anymore. It's not just that the digital divergence making progress, it is also a sign how much people like (naturally ) to be free from stuff!

When we use Facebook, Gmail, Skype or yahoo to communicate with our friends and build online communities, or use wordpress or blogspot to express ourselves and be accessible to others, or use wikipedia to learn something, Not only we are use way less paper, ink and so many other things! We actually psychologically moving away from consumerism since we adopt new goals and interests in life which does not involve buying, owning and keeping things. Naturally human beings are geared towards having a simple free life without having to hold on to so many properties (stuff).

I think stuff has started to get into us in a big after the industrial revolution. first we marveled at the ability of technology to make our lives easy by providing us with handy tools for everything. Of course after a certain limit, holding on to stuff just becomes a plain burden. It put strain into world's resources, adds onto produced waste, emit more CO2 and take up more energy. Once we trap in a consumption and purchasing lifestyle, things we buy no longer are the ones we absolutely need. We become prisoners beside a mountain of stuff we need to clean, arrange, move and maintain. When Paul Graham says "I'll take services over goods any day." he echos sentiments of most of future men.

Bypassing the safe and sane limits, buying and owning things have now become a goal and a drive in itself. Owning things become so important that it tends to even define us, and people (not to mention countries) compete with each other to own more! once it get to that level as it has now, of course it becomes nothing but a shallow activity, a bad habit (and a dangerous one for the ECO system) we need to drop!

People are indeed doing that unconscionably. Until now they didn't have an alternative avenue to put there passions in. To compete with others, to find a meaning to life. No let out to concentrate their efforts into. Hence purchasing, owning and collecting stuff became a life goal. Not anymore! With the advancement of information technology, people have finally found and finding alternative let outs for enjoyment, achievement, entertainment, expression, communication and lot more other things. Services we mentioned above are empowering people to lead satisfied lives without making them slaves of manufacturing industries and advertisements.

Now then, like manufacturing produced guns and weapons, Services too will produce negative things like ... (insert your list in here). Or people could chose to get lost in endless procrastination and loose sense of reality. In everything, there will be a choice for us to use it in a good way or in a disastrous way. However, in services there are few most noticeable benefits for all. Services do not take up natural resources to build them. Services do not produce waste. Services do not ruin environment. Services do not load us with stuff which we have to maintain and carry with us like a burden. Good services make us save our time, reduce stress. More importantly Services help us develop our real important skills such as communication, learning, gather knowledge, appreciating art, self expression... 

Improvements in service industry may help usher in the next phase of human evolution. Industrial revolution helped us giving more tools and equipment and brought about materialist, consumerism age. Similarly the revolution of information technology and services in general (Let's call it the Revolution of Services) will bring about the age of  knowledge and skill improvements. Human beings will value knowledge and the processes of acquiring it more and more instead of owning and collecting material stuff. Gaining soft skills like communication, analytical thinking, IQ, general knowledge will replace the crave for gaining more goods, owning property and even earning money, who knows! Service don;t cost much so the need for money will get reduced and that will replace by the need for intelligence, knowledge and other mental faculties... are we day dreaming? But look at it logically, once we are not so keen in buying and collecting stuff and more interested in internet, games, communication, education, self expression etc and when most of those come either free or very cheaply via new services, our need for money has to go bit down. 

There are other implications as well. What will happen to Adam Smiths theories on Supply and Demand ? Take a popular service like Gmail, Facebook, Wikepedia, Ubuntu or just even an online free game server. What happens to the supply ? that parameter doesn't seem to exist in that world! Well, unlike physical goods which get produced by limited resources (raw materials like minerals, fossil fuels, wood etc) a software product (for instance) does not take additional resources to reproduce. Once you build it first time, you can just distribute many copies for no additional cost! This is even more so for services like Gmail or Facebook. Those services can be made available for millions more without much of additional cost so the supply is no constraint. This is one reason why those services can be made available for free as they are now!

Now let's think about the implication of this. Supply and Demand which defined so many things in  manufacturing based economies will get increasingly meaningless in a service based economy. With the supply and Demand goes out, one will need to have new theories to define free market etc. May be the equivalent of that in services is Open Source. Now for old fashioned economists that might introduce more questions than answers! Without a price how can we measure wealth, progress, development etc... Well, not only soft skills a person has can not be measured by GDP, it is far more important and a valuable asset/indication than GDP. In other words our definitions of development, progress, economy all will need changes.

We can have an easy answer for all these. Google earning big money from advertisement aren't they ? so they can still be included in current economical practices, definitions and paradigms. Well may be. However, this is how old guards always tried to save their existing system, somehow trying to sneak in anomalies into the old system ignoring the fact that they don't really match nicely in it. For someone who takes the existing system as the bible, there is no other solution than to understand everything through the eyes and ears of the existing system, simply because for him, it is the only system there can ever be! However, to a open minded person, slight anomalies which highlights gaps in an established system just work as an opportunity to invent something new!

Future economists will invent new paradigms and theories to properly include service oriented economies with concepts like Open Source and 'free' which at the same does not adhere into Supply, Demand in a world where money and the importance of earning it is diminished.  This will be a vastly different environment than the current but we can already see a glimpse of it and judge how things might span out in future. Old concepts such as Capitalism, Socialism, Supply and Demand etc will either become outdated or will have redefined meanings in such a world. Which is good, for our priority is properly understanding, evaluating and modeling new events and phenomena rather than safe guarding old systems and outdated concepts!

Services will rescue human race from over consumption of environment. Services will help humans to find more challenging goals to achieve and self improvement. Above all, services will help us break free from consumerism and help save the world! At least this seems to be the best bet we have for the moment!!

Images :  http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/1824/30573932.jpg, http://www.wikipedia.org

Quality of Life in The 21st Century

                            http://www.allaboutlivingwithlife.com                                

Are humans just hard wired to consume as much as possible or is moving out of consumerist lifestyle the coming next big thing in human society ? This was the question we wondered on in the last post

Those who are new to this, also refer to this one and this and this, You will be fully armed with the context and ready to do damage!

We buy stuff mostly after falling victim to advertisement and marketing (whether we admit it or not). Advertisements are not just stuff we see in TV. Advertisements are in everywhere, some stays inside our minds from childhood as concept level, some get transmitted as fashion, advertisements even shape our thinking patterns and value systems.

We live in an era which preach consumption, consuming more means being more successful. Purchasing and owning more means more success. Ownership and consumption, those are the things which define us. What we own, in a way defines us, so we try to own better things more and more. Why do we try to earn more? Either to continue buying or to pay debts for the things we have already bought!

If everybody owns more things than really necessary and if every household is having more things which are not actually needed or not being meaningfully used, then it's obviously a big waste. More than that, it means we consume just for the sake of consuming as if we don't have any other meaningful goal in our lives. Do we live to buy that fancy car, own that big house and to use those handy gadget? Is there no other real purpose which drives us ?

Next problem is, can all of us (even if we have money) really own all those things we like? everything takes energy to get produced, every thing takes resources to get produced, only a part of those resources (if at all) get recycled back. While our craziness for owning things has no limits, resources the world has got to produce them, certainly has limits. Amount of waste the environment can absorb (generated by consumption) too certainly has limits.

The so called economical growth which drives from consumption is simply an impractical model to continue further. It is not that we have a dislike or a disagreement with the way current economies run, just that we will need something deeper and something more practical and sustainable in coming decades. Current systems may be ones evolved in last centuries and survived those times because they were suitable for those times where our ability to use up resources were too low to worry about. It is no longer the case now, will be no longer the case in future!

We need some new philosophy which help us not to run after accumulating things to be happy. Some new economical or social concepts/theories which produce more outlets to humans than just consumption.

Perhaps the biggest problem of all is that our own minds have accepted this as the reality and as the only (or main) worthwhile goal to pursue. So to make our minds happy and achieve that always illusive contentment, we are driven towards consuming more and more. If not by consuming, what else will motivate us ? What else can provide us with a drive to grow ? That raises an even more interesting question! What is growth really ? Is that the GDP ? Monthly salary we earn ? value of property we own ?

Going down the path of economic growth as defined in theories (produce more, consume more) is proving a dead end. All citizens of the world can not simply live as Americans do! Yes, even if everybody somehow manage to get 'rich', the world Eco system can not take additional vehicles on road, additional factories which require additional resources and emit additional CO2 and other waste, additional cutting down of forests to make way for additional houses, roads etc We have come to a place where we are using too much of world resources and emitting too much waste the world can take. A new practical philosophy is needed to take the world forward!

Can there be such a economy/society or a system which doesn't rely on people consuming more for it's own survival ?

I believe yes, there can be. Think about this.....

There are other goals, things we can achieve without owning physical goods. Things like having knowledge, enjoyment from sports, arts. literature etc, improving our minds whether it be mediation or positive thinking or any other psychological activity which help us feel good, feel important and makes us happy. Who says we have to earn more, spend more, buy more and own more to happy? That's the thinking advertisement has put in us for decades (for generations!)! and it's a myth! We don't necessarily need money, ownership and more things to be happy.

Is gaining more knowledge less important than owning a car ? Is improving our selves with better attitudes and mental qualities is not important than making our houses bigger ?  Is improving our brain capacities (to learn, to memorize, to analyze etc) not as important as buying things for our living rooms ? Improving our emotions and the way we react to things and compassion we can show to others, is that not as important as buying more expensive clothes to improve our outside appearances ? Is spending quality time with your family and friends inferior to spending time on increasing our spending capacity ?

There are so many better ways to enjoy the life and live happier and in a more meaningful manner without buying/owning/holding things. If that's the case whats the point of putting up a staggering amount of time on making money ? After all, the sole purpose of money is to increase our capacity to buy things. When we have more time we will be more able to appreciate the little things in life which we have missed all this time. We can make more friends, express ourselves more, love more, live more... Quality of life for the 21st century!

This could be a new philosophy which will guide this century. We simply do not need to consume more to be happier!! Sometimes letting go of things, be free from things is the best form of peace and happiness. That will be good for the environment too! Probably we will hear more and more about concepts such as Gross National Happiness

Does this mean going back to the stone age ? certainly not! Moving away from materialistic view open ways and new adventures for the mind and body. There are so much to achieve, so much to gain and so much to grow in the area of improving our own minds. We could foresee an intense competitive future where humans are driven passionately toward ever more challenging tasks for the mind and body, whether it be sports, self expression, arts, science, enhancing the IQ, improving attitudes, improving memory capacity and analytical thinking...

There is an endless world of possibilities, probably even more so and certainly much more satisfying and beneficial goals for us to achieve than just pursuing after material goods, stuff. Human mind is currently just trapped in a very limited materialistic world where it strive only about pursuing consumerist dreams. Imagine a world  where the human mind body and soul is unleashed and free to achieve it's true potential!

In the industrial age, we have transformed into a efficient societies which produces more and consume more, we proved ourselves as very good at it. Now that it's limitations are becoming obvious, isn't it any wonder that the next great age to come would be moving away from consumerism and pursuing goals of self growth, real happiness and advancements in mind and mental faculties? Pursuing happiness and greatness! In this sense arguments such as ones on socialism vs capitalism becomes outdated. All current economical systems and theories are for increasing production and increasing consumption. What we are discussing is a fundamental mental shift from that world.

Also, letting go of things is much more complicated than it sounds.... Sometimes you need the technology to make that feasible! How to get rid of bulkier things which need more resources and energy ? How to invent things which absorb human minds (which are no longer going after physical goods) and provide it with challenges and objectives to engage in with passion ? In fact, we will have a higher set of challenges for the technology which will have to play an even bigger role!

In a future post we will discuss the shape of those technological advances together with emerging trends, and wonder whether things are already moving in the direction they should be moving.....

PS : Services to Rescue the sequel of this post.

Middleground on Capitalism and Socialism, Where have you gone ?

                                                                  (chrismadden.co.uk)

In an earlier post, we discussed few fashions in our society and why certain fashions are harmful. Looks like there are more and more subtle not so obvious types of fashions for those we all fall into at one point or the other. Nothing terribly wrong with that either, as that's the usual way human beings learn, by trial and error. However it will be useful to be aware of our thinking process and be alert to occasions when we want to say or do something just because that is the fashion of the day to do so!

This thought occurred to me when following a particualr topic in the renown blogs of Chanuka Wattegama and Aruni Shapiro, where both were claiming to be capitalists but seems like there is a disagreement on the level of capitalism. Now, I don't mean any disrespect to those authors, infact I read them regularly and even learning new things from them, Chanuka of course we all know from Vidusara days, among other things. The thought occurred to me was something entirely different and nothing directly related to above bloggers.

It is not too long ago that we saw similar arguments and races to show and prove who among us are the real and most genuine socialists. The resulting irony of comparison of times (present against that of about just 2 decades ago) is too hard to go unnoticed. Do we remember those speeches we heard from stages, discussions, arguments on stage, arguments on TV and even on arguments in news papers ? Now, those days were the times where claiming to be a socialist was the order of the day. Socialism meant more progressive, more philanthropic, more advanced less greedy and purer. Different marxist parties actually fought over the rights of being true left. Intellectuals were no different! Openly and publicly claiming to be a capitalist was an unheard of thing those days.

When CBK wanted to introduce her new economy policy she had to choose the words carefully and offer something like a 'humane look for the open economy'. Just acknowledging to be a raw fan of open economic policies was a taboo. Do you support open economy.. no way! it's the cause of all evil that's why there is a war in north, the degration of social values, erosion of humanism and so on.. Fashion was to be against capitalism and open economy but to sound like a socialist. There was even a jargon, set of terms which sounded more socialist than others. Now, all this was not just among ordinary folks like you and me, it was the fashion also (or should we say 'specially') among intelectuals!  

So forgive me having a fun time watching how the world has changed. Today, the fashion is to be a capitalist! race is to be the biggest and most daring capitalist of 'em all! Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to make fun of any one. Just enjoying observing the social movements and changes in society which unravel rapidly in front of our own eyes. I myself was mildly following the socialism fashion for a time being. (Well, who wouldn't like to be little stylish when they are young? Unfortunately it wasn't fun for those who didn't survive in 87/89, some just didn't make it after following that particular fashion of socialism back then.) However, this time I will be extra cautious! Just following a fashion is not so smart when one is no longer young and expected to posses a balanced mind. Fashion these days is to sound like a firm capitalist, to talk about the benefits of freemarket and how the demand and supply going to solve everything, be against all form of subsidies and welfare etc. When so many of our people and politicians getting together and saying the same thing with lot of assuarance, that usually mean something is wrong!

Sometimes fashions can be correct too. Can this be one such occasion ? Whole world, after so many experiments have evolved economically and found the one true and real system which actually works. Capitalism. Can that be the case ? This, is an argument beyond the scope of a single (or a series of) post, I'm not even trying.  For fashion lovers, we will just show that even capitalism has it's limits and will become outdated much sooner than they might think. 

Capitalism grows when the consumption grows. When consumption goes down, capitalist creatures go into that hibernate mode of theirs call recessions. In fact, consumption is the metric used to measure how developed a economy is. How much do you consume per a month? a lot more than you neighbor? ah, then you are richer than him! that's how it works. So when we grow yearly, we get used to consume more and more and more. Why is milk food expensive now ? because Indians and Chinese have got rich and has started to consume more milk. Why is fuel prices going up ? because we are consuming more and more fuel, actually to sustain economic growth, it will be needed to consume more and more fuel. (at least until solar energy become cheap, but till that happens, there will be a deep recession if not enough fuel is available to consume). There is a saying that price of fuel will sky rocket to new dimension if all Indians take a fancy to driving own cars. With what Ratan Tata is upto, that just might really happen!

So what's the problem? we will continue consuming more, standard of living will go up, advance of science will find ways of consuming more and more things cheaply. There lies the problem.... There simply is not enough resources to go on doing this forever at this pace and acceleration! At one point, the world and it's limited resources will go on strike, that will be a one strike which will need little more than a pay hike to those socialist workers to subdue. The world, it appears has it's own few trade unions to talk through. Climate change is one, increased carbon emissions as a direct result of consumption is another. Rising sea levels, polluted air and water resources, dwindling forests.. wait! some minimum land mass will be needed to keep as forests to preserve the balance of nature. As of fossil fuels, all types of metals etc they would be non-reneawable sources, that is they have a cap. Once you use them, they are not going to come back again (not in our life time that is)

So, the capitalist consumerism dream is not going to be a one which can be sustained with a steady growth forever. If we have an endless source of resources, then one might argue even a greed (consume) based system might last long, but we haven't got one. Science will advance and help us to increase the efficiency of how we are using the limited resources but even that pace can't cope with the unlimited potential of greed. Greed has no bound, even if we increase our consumption levels by each day, we will then complain about the rate of our increase in consumption. The one who grows in the higher rate would be the man to beat then!


This is not a new argument or another doomsday forecast. The world eco system simply have a limit which it can endure, the world can support only upto a certain number of humans at a time, for instance. Similarly it can support only upto a certain levle of consumption by those humans, we will eventually need to limit our consumption and limit the amount of waste we produce and amount of carbon dioxide we produce. (Every production produces CO2, so consumption is linked to carbon emissions which is linked to global warming which causes rising sea levels which warm things even further etc.) Therefore the world will eventually need a new way of thinking which transform our mindset to check our desires, consume less and be contended. That will not be a choice but a necessity.

Now, all that was just to show that there is a limit to capitalism beyond which it too will have to be discarded. That particular thinking can be a fashion in future! When capitalism go out of fashion, who knows, we all might be trying to be the most 'greener' person instead! Well, if that were to happen, at least that will be a fashion which is actually a relief for the worn out world and the environment! Meanwhile, let's not scare off anybody yet and let us generously give the capitalist dream (so called American dream!) another decade or two. Like I said, this post is not about economy, it's about fashion!

Just one last caution for fashion lovers. It's the second mouse which gets the cheese! so let's not rush, let's wait and observe the first mouse a bit.


Feel free to express your burning, flaming disagreements (and meek agreements too!) and let all of us learn something from them.