Most business concepts have a short shelf life. They cannot withstand the test of time, resulting in a cycle of peaks and valleys. Be it B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to customer), they invariably come and go and when they go they leave many many clutching straws.
The burst of the dot.com bubble in the early 2000s constitutes one of those transient periods. The false dawn of the “knowledge economy” where everything was deemed to be digitizable, also proved to be a serious deception. Not all books, for example, can be digitized and rendered into soft copies; the same goes with magazines and newspapers.
There remain a sizable portion of people that prefer to hold their reading materials in tangible, and hard form, without which they cannot savor the experience of reading or make notes on the things they read. Thus, notwithstanding the appearance of Kindle,orAmazon.com, there are legions that believe in reading and holding on to their books.
Bryan Kramer believes that H2H, human to human, business connections, which manifests itself in “gig” economy or “sharing economy,” is here to stay. On this issue, he may be right. Idle facilities can be put to good use, at a price, if there is a system of prior verification, moderation, and peer review. Regardless of what it is called, perhaps even an “on demand economy,” something new has arrived.
H2H refers to the existence and evolution of an economy where idling facilities of individuals i.e. rooms, apartments, time, car seating capacities, even skill sets, can be bartered and exchanged at a fraction of the price of a conventional business offering the same service, thus forever transforming the essence of capitalism. Previous iterations of capitalism were based on a hierarchical relationship. The current form of H2H capitalism is completely horizontal. Indeed, the letter points to the arrival of AirBnB, Uber, Lyft, Grabcar and many more forms of services that have proven successful in the West and Japan.
The “Share economy” works like this: when two or more humans connect with their own human needs, even for a brief moment in time, an instant connection based on faith, trust and other positive human elements are brought forth. If one of the two should fail to deliver their part of the bargain their reputations would be forever tarnished. They could not use the service again. A fate more severe than being blacklisted as bankrupt.
H2H is a form of a network economy that points to the nifty use of technology and good old-fashioned trust. It is also based on world class service, cleanliness, and point-to-point delivery. It is the future face of capitalism andundoubtedly, it is evolving into a more efficient reduction of idle facilities.