In the early 20th century Henry Ford combined moving assembly lines with mass labour to make building cars much cheaper and quicker””thus turning the automobile from a rich man’s toy into transport for the masses. Today a growing group of entrepreneurs is striving to do the same to services, bringing together computer power with freelance workers to supply luxuries that were once reserved for the wealthy. Uber provides chauffeurs. Handy supplies cleaners. SpoonRocket delivers restaurant meals to your door. Instacart keeps your fridge stocked. In San Francisco a young computer programmer can already live like a princess.
Yet this on-demand economy goes much wider than the occasional luxury. Click on Medicast’s app, and a doctor will be knocking on your door within two hours. Want a lawyer or a consultant? Axiom will supply the former, Eden McCallum the latter. Other companies offer prizes to freelances to solve R&D problems or to come up with advertising ideas. And a growing number of agencies are delivering freelances of all sorts, such as Freelancer.com and Elance-oDesk, which links up 9.3m workers for hire with 3.7m companies.
The on-demand economy is small, but it is growing quickly….
It’s quite an insidious movement that has infiltrated places where it probably doesn’t belong. This subject came up over Christmas while I was speaking to a relative-by-marriage who is an aerospace engineer. He noted several recent financially injurious and indeed tragic incidents that were the result of management decisions to buy mechanical parts off the shelf rather than pay for designing, engineering, and testing them for the tasks and performance level needed. “Spend a penny” was once part of a useful aphorism.