Welcome to the “Right Now” World
It seems today that we need to find an apt acronym or a pithy phrase to describe the latest new idea, development or tech craze in order to make these things (which aren’t exactly rocket science to begin with) real and understandable for the masses or at least for the mass media. Everything seems to be about buzzwords and jargon and the critical need to have a catchy log line or two. The name game is as much a part of the norm now as the novelty of the idea and owning a killer URL or app name is worth at least as much as your highly-polished elevator pitch because the name itself might be the thing that gets you in the door in the first place – long before you have a chance to extol the virtues of your business.
But sometimes the pundits’ rush to find a fitting formulation (or to rudely jam something into a framework or structure that they’re already hawking) leads to a characterization or description that’s more “high concept” than helpful. Simpler is almost always better, but sometimes it’s not sufficient to get the story told. Right now, I think we’re seeing this process operating on a daily basis with the world’ newest fetish – the “sharing” economy. Sharing may be a part of the story, but it’s not the whole answer or enough of an explanation to really help us understand what offerings are real (for the long term) and which are here for today and likely to be long gone tomorrow because they’re mainly just way stations or transitional solutions. There’s a fairly obvious reason why Reed Hastings called his business Netflix rather than Mailflix. It’s never really about who’s first – it’s always about who’s best and who’s the last one standing.
So, while it's true that in some cases part of the new economy relies on the sharing of certain common assets (we "share" the use of individual Divvy bikes in Chicago and timeshares of all kinds have been around forever), the real significant changes are better described as products and services (and, of course, applications) that are increasingly permitting millions of us to monetize (not share) our excess capacity or our surplus assets. And that’s why we need a broader frame of reference for these new economic ecosystems.
Initially, I was convinced that a far better and more descriptive term for at least the transactional part of this new phenomenon was to call it the "Surplus Economy" wherein each of us would be permitted to market and exploit our underutilized assets and resources - these could be skills, talents, time, labor, property, knowledge, etc. - by using our new connectivity tools and the ability to immediately and cost-effectively reach global marketplaces - to sell and distribute our valuable properties and abilities to others largely without regard to (and generally free of) the time and place restrictions which have historically made such widespread and hyper-efficient marketplaces impossible on the kind of scale that we are already beginning to see across a number of different industry sectors. We weren’t trying to share our talents – we were quite clearly trying to sell them to as many takers and interested parties as possible as quickly and easily as we could.
However, this primary concentration on the seller-side demands and desires of these new marketplaces and on the technical nature of the transactions which they enabled turned out to be insufficiently broad to fairly describe what was going on because this characterization failed to account for the buyer-side actions and objectives as well as the very critical temporal (time-based) component of these new services. The sellers clearly wanted to sell (as sellers always do), but the buyers’ demands were more complicated.
First, they needed to efficiently discover the availability of the opportunities being offered in the midst of the immense noise, clutter and confusion of our online world and to connect with the parties on the other side of the prospective transaction. Interestingly enough, as important as being global is to the providers of these services, hyper-local solutions have the most appeal to the end-users on both sides of the deals.
Second, they needed to authenticate and validate the offers being made. (This is a topic all of its own and suitable for a separate piece.) But surprisingly this requirement is becoming less and less of a concern to substantial numbers of consumers. They don’t want to be defrauded or otherwise ripped off or cheated, but – at least until they’ve been burned once or twice - they’re more concerned with other elements and aspects of these transactions.
Third, they needed established and credible systems for payment which – for all intents and purposes – are a given these days.
And finally, and most importantly to understanding the entirety of what’s going on, the buyers want it when and where they want it and - most of the time - they want it NOW. Time is the scarcest resource in our lives today and these businesses across the board are selling us time and convenience every bit as much as they are providing whatever product or service we’re seeking. You can call this the “on-demand” or the “on-time” economy, but because the expectations of all consumers are progressive and constantly rising, I’m calling it the “Right Now” economy because (a) that’s where we are all headed; and (b) if your business or company isn’t operating in this new real time, right now, competitive world, you can be sure that someone is coming up right behind you to offer a better, faster, cheaper and more attractive service than yours and to offer it right now.
The implications, challenges, opportunities and problems (especially from a regulatory perspective) which these new economic ecosystems present are almost beyond calculation and the new kinds of businesses which they will spawn are enterprises that we are just beginning to imagine. When you consider the degree to which (at least at the outset) these new systems (a) require little or no capital, (b) utilize modest and readily available technologies, (c) build upon existing consumer skills and behaviors, and (d) basically free-ride on stable and well-established distribution systems, it's easy to understand how quickly and globally the “Right Now” economy is growing with no end in sight.
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