From a business perspective, “a pleasant environment” is not a competitive advantage. For it to be a competitive advantage, we need to understand why, structura

From a business perspective, “a pleasant environment” is not a competitive advantage. For it to be a competitive advantage, we need to understand why, structurally, WeWork can offer this and Regus can’t. By way of analogy, if we say that Amazon’s pricing is a “competitive advantage,” we can also explain what Amazon has done structurally that makes their pricing hard to copy. Anybody can set a low price on a product or service, but not everybody can do so and make money. Same with WeWork. If a nice environment is a competitive advantage, we can point to something in WeWork’s structure that makes it difficult for Regus to duplicate. If Regus can duplicate it without difficulty, then we need to rethink whether it’s an advantage, or simply something you happen to prefer, but doesn’t matter. By way of a different analogy, consider free coffee in hotel rooms. Everybody prefers it, but for decades you got it in motel chains, but not from the big hotel operations. Why idn’t they offer free coffee? Because their customers were actually corporations, and the things that mattered to corporations were centralized billing, locations close to airports and business centres, and so forth. This allowed the big hotels to drag their feet on in-room amenities like free coffee or free WiFi. It wasn’t nearly the competitive advantage it appeared to be.