Trade-Off
Chapter One
Chapter One
The Fidelity Swap
We constantly, in our everyday lives, make trade-offs between the fidelity of an experience and its convenience. It happens when we decide to watch a baseball game on TV instead of going to the park, make a phone call instead of meeting face-to-face, eat fast food at McDonald's instead of a nice meal at a restaurant, or buy $300 noise-canceling Bose headsets instead of using the inexpensive earbuds that come with the music player. Businesses, nonprofits, and governments make the same kinds of trade-offs in their buying decisions.
The way those trade-offs work and play out in the marketplace is the key to countless business successes and failures. This is the fidelity swap.
This fidelity swap has been going on since humans invented commerce. But the role of technology today accelerates the whole process.
There are five key concepts behind the fidelity swap:
Fidelity versus convenience. Fidelity is the total experience of something. At a rock concert, for instance, it's not just the quality of the sound—which often isn't as good as listening to a CD on a home stereo—but al ... read full excerpt from: Trade-Off ebook
