Why subscription may be the solution to fix the business model

Maybe life is going to turn into one big subscription service?

As Damon Darlin writes in the New York Times

Everywhere you look these days, businesses are selling subscriptions. Cable television, Internet and cellphone services are sold that way. So are business software, office printing and car rentals like Zipcars.

The new business model replacing the one that has existed since the industrial revolution has now come to the end and in an effort to find a new one this could be it.

The rational way to think about your purchases, says V. Seenu Srinivasan, a Stanford business school professor, is to replace a product when the benefits of a new version outweigh the costs — financial and psychological — of upgrading.

so replace that with subscription which

moves consumers over the hurdle of mentally depreciating an existing asset.