I mean, what is a customer anymore? 

Go into any business in any industry these days and inevitably the C bomb comes up. These are the people who we need to listen to more.. and respond to.. and keep in mind, and moreover .. manage. And what does a customer do?

Well, they keep us in business of course.. they buy stuff.. anyone interested in that choice of words should have a look at what George Carlin thinks of 'stuff'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac

but how much longer can this keep going on, I mean really?  how much more stuff do we need... doesn't anyone want to do stuff instead?

Sure they do..  because doing stuff is heaps more fun than getting stuff. Talking about what you did is more interesting than talking about what you got.

In fact, it seems that the things we want to acquire today are mechanisms to allow us to do stuff.. rather than things in their own right. The only point of owning something is to be able to have control of it so you can use it whenever you like. Ownership equates largely with convenience.

Lets take cars for example...  in years gone by to use a car it was necessary to own a car and seeing as everyone wanted to use cars, we all had to own them.. and given this, the people who made cars focussed on what would make us want to OWN them.  Fast forward to today and in an ever diminishing return on investment for people who make cars, we have basically reached a point where any car will do what is fundamentally required by the user and now we start to question the method via which we access the use of it rather than consider the ownership of it. Less and less the people who use cars are the customer... the customer is the taxi operator, the car share operator, the city council.

Perhaps the car manufacturer should treat the person getting driven from A - B as a user and not a customer and adapt their problem solving and business model accordingly.

In software development our task is fundamentally to understand what the user has to do .. (and the word experience is used a lot). One of the key challenges is to understand the users problem adequately so you can understand how to develop the solution they NEED.

Note the absence of the word want..   at its core software deals with needs, not wants.

Perhaps the physical goods that are produced that form the basis of an end users experience need to adopt more of a software development approach to their thinking. Lets go back to cars..  not what does the customer want in a car, but what does the user need with respect to a personal mode of transport?

Accessibility?

Price?

Environmental credentials?

Different transport modes for different situations (in software we call that features)?

Convenience?

If the problem can be described as 'I need an on-demand solution to enable my physical travel from my current location to another location in any weather and may involve other people coming and some personal effects' - then solve this problem... address this need.

I intend to explore this topic further, but Saturday is calling. There is an experience out there with my name on it.