Means and Ends

Tech blogger, Ben Thompson, wrote about this company called Bird that allows users to rent electric scooters. Recently Bird decided to provide such scooters to independent operators who could then run their own fleets, even re-brand them. So what’s in it for Bird? One, they get 20% of the ride fees; and two, all those scooters will show up on Bird’s rent-a-scooter app.

Did that sound a bit like Uber? Of course, it did. No surprise then that there are rumours that Uber may buy Bird. Harvard professor, Theodore Levitt, famously said:

“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”

See the connection to Uber and Bird? People want to go from A to B, the cab (or scooter) is just a means to that end. Ergo, it makes perfect sense for Uber to focus on the end (transport) instead of getting hung up on the means (cab v/s scooter).

By the same logic, Thompson wonders if rent-a-room/home site, AirBnB, should start listing hotels on their app. After all, the end for users is to find a place to stay, so why get tied down to one means only (renting a room or a home)?

Amazon certainly seems to follow the theme of Thompson’s blog. It may have started as a place to sell books, but has since expanded to being the place to sell pretty much everything under the sun. Put differently, the end was always “selling things”.

Google’s another company that fits the bill of the theme of this blog. Their famous mission statement was to “organize the information of the world”. And they’ve only got better at that, be it via search or organizing your photos or the world’s videos (YouTube) or finding the fastest route (Maps and Waze).