Experience-Oriented Enterprises

For many years we've heard pundits describe how businesses have evolved from offering raw materials, to finished products, to services, and finally to entire experiences -- with every transition up the "value ladder" allowing for more differentiation, better profit margins, etc.

I think I finally get it -- not because it wasn't understandable before, but because now it's really happening and I can feel it in my bones.

Apple sells the Apple experience: slick, expertly-crafted devices that make you feel amazing at just opening the box, much less using them, admiring them, delighting in how they've nailed how machines should interact with humans. I'm still a PC user for the most part (though I've upgraded from Windows Vista to Windows XP and I'll soon upgrade to Mac OS X, completing the circle I started on NeXT OS many years ago). But I grit my teeth every day struggling with Windows, with Lenovo, with drivers and bizarre behavior and constantly-crashing Outlook and (until recently) with Windows Mobile that after 6 releases is still several generations behind iPhone 1.0. I don't want to grit any more: it's 2007, and I want a computer that doesn't suck, and maybe even one that goes a bit beyond my expectations. I want a computer store that knows something about computers (hear that, Fry's?) and when the line at the register gets too long equips their sales people with mobile registers (a.k.s. PDAs) they can carry out to the customers. Apple gets it.

Whole Foods is an experience company. It isn't even necessarily more expensive than Safeway or Anderson's, but boy what a difference: you feel good just walking in, the staff are for the most part incredibly friendly and knowledgeable, they don't stock the garbage that too many people ingest daily, and if you don't like the cake you bought yesterday the woman at the bakery counter may just hand you another pie of your choosing even if you have neither the receipt for the cake nor the cake itself. I could not have imagined my family looking forward to going to a grocery store just for the hell of it -- until Whole Foods.

Google largely gets it, in that most Google things you interact with -- the search page, Google maps, the toolbar, gmail, the calendar, Google reader, Google code -- are delightful, do what they're supposed to well or even incredibly well (maps), and make you feel glad you chose to use them. Yes, we have a choice, and more often than not we choose Google not only because it works but because it feels good -- it's a good experience.

And then there are the anti-experience companies. This is almost too easy: most airlines (they do provide true experiences, but not ones you want to remember); most things Microsoft (but they do have excellent developer tools); Home Depot (a great idea that went terribly wrong); most cell phone carriers. If people love to hate a company, there's probably a good reason for it. And when they love a company -- a brand, really -- they'll reward it almost beyond reason. (What possible rationale is there behind the pricing of iPods, esp. the red nano?)

I strive every day for my current company, Aptana, to be a great experience company, a name synonymous with a great web development experience, with a real understanding of and appreciation for the Ajax craft.

When you think about it, each one of us is a brand of sorts, and people around us associate us over time with an experience. Some people always make you feel good, some you associate with creativity and insight and always being at the right place at the right time, and some trigger almost Pavlovian nausea and disgust (consider a certain current president). What's your brand?