Instant gratification
Its the “I want it now” feeling. This is why brick and mortar stores are still alive since people can go get it now as compared to waiting for a few days. Think what Amazon sales would look like if they could build a teleporting machine for all the physical goods it sells!
Taking a tangent into philosophy land (since its so hard for me to avoid it), I won’t go as far as saying that the world is divided into two kinds of people - those who want it now and those who don’t - since I think most people would prefer having it now if that was an option, though there is something to be said about ordering something and the anticipation and thrill involved in waiting for it to arrive :).
However, instant gratification seems to be the order of the day as products offering this service are booming!
- Kindle: Sold as many e-books in 4 years (2008-2011) as the Amazon store sold paper books in 15 years!
- Twitter: News, realtime discussion. Now with 100M active users.
- Spotify: Free music streaming and sharing. Growing like mad! Not a typical example of instant gratification since music access has been instant for a long time now, but subscription services like Spotify, Rdio, etc. have made it easy to listen to as many songs as you want, which I would say is akin to the feeling of instant gratification.
- Google: Instant Search, though its pretty fast otherwise as well :). People might not think of Search as instant gratification, but I’ll put it in that category as its getting the information you want instantly (generally and that’s at least the goal).
… I’m sure there are lots more.
