by twieberneit | Feb 26, 2018 | Blog |
In the past weeks I have been to some events. Their main topic has been ‘digital transformation’, which is a term that currently gets used all over the place. The good news is that people mostly seem to have understood that digital transformation most of all is a business transformation, with IT being an enabler, not a driver. However, and that’s the bad news, one term popped up everywhere like a bad charm. Sharing Economy And the usual suspect companies are cited as the trailblazers of this sharing economy: Airbnb is apparently the biggest hotel chain. But it does now own a single hotel, rather than a bed Uber, the biggest taxi corporation. It does not own a single taxi I even heard Amazon and Alibaba being mentioned in this context. And then there are plenty more companies that one could mention, like TaskRabbit, Lyft, Zaarly, you name them. There are few terms that make me flinch like this one, maybe ‘democratization of <take your pick of technology>. Why? Because the term does not describe the concept behind the model. Instead it creates a cozy feeling of perhaps doing something good by sharing one’s possessions with someone else. The Oxford Dictionary defines the verb share as ‘have a portion of (something) with another or others’. Sharing in its original context is about jointly using or enjoying something, in a wider sense it is about giving someone else access to something. In any case it has some altruistic touch to it. What the above mentioned companies are about is, positively speaking, helping me to give access to something that I...
