Harvard professor Theodore Levitt once said that people don’t buy drills; they buy holes.
If they could have the hole without buying the drill, they would just take the hole.
That has always struck me as a very interesting observation – that people don’t really want to buy a drill, but would rather buy a hole in the wall.
€100,000 for a piece of software?
We still talk about it as if we were buying or selling software. But we don’t. We are buying a service. 9 times out of 10, you don’t buy the source code, you use it.
In fact, we are increasingly renting the software it in the form of a subscription. And in doing so, let the vendor take the entire IT behind it out of your hands.
The point is:
No one needs software (except a few IT departments).
We need its value. The outcome. The result.
We need the hole in the wall, not the drill.
So the question is, besides paying for the cost of the service, what other resources do we need, what other investments do we need to make to get the full value out of this service?
Paying a lot of money for a wonderful tool when you still have the same number of planners, an administrator and integration costs, and each user spends more time in the tool than before, is only good for the software vendor.
It starts with the question: how does it improve my workflow? And what does it provide?
