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

A continent of mistakes

                                                                           (http://www.dailygalaxy.com)
There is a new continent forming in the pacific ocean! A vast new continent twice the size of Texas and it's growing each year!!

Unfortunately, this is not good news, as the new continent is formed by waste we throw away, things which are not bio degradable. When we made them, we knew these stuff (polythene, plastics) would last long and causing problems but we have simply thrown them away from our immediate neighborhoods and looked the other way pretending the problem is non existent.

Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a testament for human selfishness, ignorance and mad consumerism. Something we all should be ashamed of. A child born out of : ignoring a problem, laughing out early indications of a problem, pretending the world has unlimited natural resources and pretending the world has unlimited capacity to take on the waste we produce.

A continent of a monument to show, remind and alert us the on our greedy lifestyles and the direct results of consumerism! For more about this continent and to know why we are already powerless to reverse the damage, visit here and here. 

An interesting thing to note is the list of surrounding countries of the proud new continent. America, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan...  So called developed world and few countries who have achieved fast economic growths recently.

However, the biggest tragedy of all is may be the fact that even a continent of mistakes is not enough to waken us up! Instead of consuming less, producing less, re-use and recycle, we are still thinking of how to continue and even accelerate our proven faulty life style....

If this issue is so real, why don't we discuss about it more often ? Why is media silent about this ? There lies the other tragedy of current generations. Mass media is not acting as a solution, it's a part of the problem. Media needs consumerism to survive! If the real answer is to Restrict our usage and consumption, how many people will really like to hear that ? If the consumption and production to go down,  what will happen to our lifestyle and 'economic growth' we are so taught to believe in ?

OK, let's look at this from a different angle, What we just discussed was one result which we are powerless to reverse anymore. Let's start from the point of generation and see what produced this, how and why ...  

Let's Imagine a house with just the basic little amount of furniture, less electrical equipments and gadgets.. think about a place with only most needed equipments and nothing else. Such a place would have empty spaces to move about, less clutter, less amount of cleaning and maintenance. It will have simplicity and would serve to add a sense of serenity and peace of mind.

Now compare it with a house full of gadgets, equipments, furniture and what not. When we imagine, we have to be realistic (the things TV adds won't tell us), some of things in such a house may not be working. Some of things may be missing among number of other things. Some things may not be as clean as we would like them to be, for keeping all those things in an orderly manner, in working condition and keeping them clean at  all times need time and attention. Not just once or twice, but daily! Things demand time and attention from us don't they?

Things we have, sometimes tend to define who we are, if we have way too many things, we are bounded, restricted and limited in freedom because we have to maintain those things while a person without them is free of that burden! If we  have a car, we have to wash it regularly, make it clean, keep it serviced, get it repaired when it breaks etc. Now, what happens if we have 2 vehicles? it's even more of work. Those tasks of maintaining our cars eat up our time, energy and focus. In a sense, car will start to own us that way since it get us to do things for it. More things we have, more slaves we become of those things we own.

It's very important to decide exactly what things we really need and not committing to too many physical things in our lives. Even when we see a moderate convenience of having something, we should question ourselves, is it really worth the trouble of having it? How will it be few months after purchasing, will it still going to be that useful and look that pretty ? will we really use it that many times as we expect to ? or will it be like that exercising machine under a bed which we haven't taken out in a month?

Just buying something is not the end, paying the monetary value is not the end, things have hidden price tags attached to them. Every thing needs some time and attention from us. This untold price is mostly go unnoticed when we buy something. We are trained to see a purchase as a win if it's 'cheaper' than the market value. Well, come to think of it any price would be too expensive for something we really don;t have a need for. We are not entirely at fault for getting blinded for that simple fact, for we are being continuously attacked day after day by media and social peer pressure to buy this and buy that. Advertisements! If we have some extra money at hand, resisting the urge to buy something is simply not as easy as it sounds. Not only us who get those urges, our kids, spouse, brothers/sisters they also get the urge to 'take something home'!

So eventually any quite peaceful house becomes a junk yard over the years. Full of things which are either not used regularly or can not be used effectively for some reason or simply we don't anymore have time  to sacrifice for them.

What if we clean our houses of stuff which are not absolutely needed ? that is good but it's not the proper answer. When we buy a thing which is not absolutely needed, we have already done the damage! Getting rid of them from our houses means we are simply putting the burden on somewhere else and going to selfishly look at the other way. This was exactly what produced the continent of waste we just saw!

Proper answer is to limit the consumption and produce less, then reuse and recycle the rest! So called 3 R's of Green Peace. Restrict, Re-Use and Recycle.

After all, 80% of stuff we think are useful and must haves are really not! we could easily and more conveniently and more freely live without them! Still doubtful about the real 'value' of stuff we have and what it is doing to us? read here on the subject of stuff. To identify the shallowness of buying and owning stuff and to move away from it, one does not need to be an environmentalist or a socialist! Just stopping being a mindless slave (following the fashion) to consumerism is enough so it seems.

In a future post, we will look closely for the ways out of consumerism and how to live happy and healthy lives without destroying the world. Is it possible at all? Are humans just hard wired to senseless consumption or is moving out of consumerist lifestyle the coming next big thing  in human society ?

Meanwhile, here are few past related posts.

Middleground on Capitalism and Socialism, Where have you gone ?

End the burning, Cool down and Clean up!

Lighting Up The Dark!

 

PS : Added two sequels to this :

How to reduce consumption and still enjoying the life and

Current trends which are already taking us in that direction.