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UrbanVolt solves the problem by replacing its customers’ lights at no initial cost; each client then pays UrbanVolt a monthly share of the savings on its electr
by Lagged2Death 10y ago
UrbanVolt solves the problem by replacing its customers’ lights at no initial cost; each client then pays UrbanVolt a monthly share of the savings on its electrical bill.
This is exactly how the makers of advanced stationary steam engines operated after the start of the industrial revolution. The engine is "free," the customer pays a fraction of the fuel savings.
What I don't understand is: how come it's not the established players like GE or ConEd who are pursuing these strategies? If someone's going to eat your lunch, why not make sure it's you?
- buzzybee 10y agoIt's really, really hard to change an old organization to follow a different business model without effectively firing everyone, selling everything off, and starting over. There's inertia in the various forms of personnel specialties, management style, capital expenditures, and financing. A tiny company can change that stuff in the span of a single email because there isn't anything to unwind, but a big company that has gone to great effort to optimize its existing position and has a lot of stakeholders to appease will run into trouble even if it has visionary leadership that can see the problem. For that reason, startups can persistently find opportunities: e.g. IBM had a rental-computing business model, so it gave up a big early advantage in the PC market while scarcely realizing it; Microsoft swooped in to occupy the new monopoly on software.