Selling a Friend

Selling a Friend is a tough decision. I fell in love with this bike already in 2009 when I took my motorcycle driver's licence. And in 2010 I picked a color and ordered one, shiny and new, directly from a BMW factory in Germany. And it didn't matter that motorcycle season in Sweden is very short, that we spend almost all of it abroad, and that at that time I had two very small kids. I just wanted to own it. And ownership came with a couple of drawbacks, the worst one being that bad feeling of owning something that is being used way too little. I regularly screen my home for things being used too little and get rid of those. Decision of getting rid of a bike is different - it has that emotional component. 

I went through a similar emotional process when getting rid of the car some years ago. We chose to transform ourselves gradually together with the industry. First we outsourced changing of the car tires. Then we got rid of the storage space in our basement and outsourced it to a tire storage company. After that we outsourced all boring shopping to companies such as Mathem, got rid of the garage space and sold the car. Now, if we feel like going by car, we use Car2Go, DriveNow, Uber and taxis for short-range travels, car pooling for mid-range travels, and rental cars for long-range travels. But I should say that public transportation is gradually becoming more convenient, personalized and cool. The question is what kind of service you are after - the driving experience, transportation from A to B, or a specific mission being accomplished. In the latter case, transportation-related services may not need to be involved at all.

We're becoming more servitized - in the era of Internet of Things one does not need to own things that lose value. There is a lot of value to grab and share between people and industries due to economies of scale, and there are big advantages from sustainability perspective. But I should say that we still keep a picture of one of our cars in a frame...