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Comment by m3mnoch | Hacker News Reader

two quick things.

on the cars -- horses were bought and sold. trains. boats. you name it. buying a product that is transformed by technology is not the same as trying to take a service and transform it into a product through technology. you can augment the service (large margins) or automate the service (thin margins), but you can't turn it into a product.

on the sheet music -- precisely! that's the exact analogy. note the incredible consumer demand for sheet music today! it's not exactly a booming market outside of the niche training/instruction arena.

edit: btw, that last bit about the incredible demand today for sheet music was sarcasm. just in case it didn't come across....

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> you can augment the service (large margins) or automate the service (thin margins), but you can't turn it into a product.

Why not?

playing fast and loose with formal definitions here, but basically because services, by their very nature, are scarce goods -- you are paying for someone's time. once you productize/automate that, it becomes non-scarce and the marginal cost falls through the floor.

so, like the whole ideas and sharing flames analogy.

now, note, this does not pertain to products that perform services. that's a whole 'nuther ball of wax. but, in our example, that'd be like cloning the musician rather than the music.

This simply does not apply to music, where each producer has the monopoly on their music. Only once you take piracy into account does that change. But then your thesis also changes from "you can't get people to pay for recorded music" to "you can't get people to pay for recorded music because it so happens they can steal it", which are two different things altogether.

> this does not pertain to products that perform services.

This is exactly what a recording does, though -- it automates a performance.

no.

the music recording is the manifestation of the performance/service. so, not viable as a product.

cd players perform the service of playing the music. (aka automates the performance) totally viable as a product.

think of it like a many-to-one relationship. the "one" is what can be productized. the "many" cannot. scarcity is key for what can be economically considered product-viable.

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