Turning Product to Service

I just read a great article from Fast Company about turning products into services.  Here is just a bit that I thought was particularly compelling.

Tap Into Time: Shift the financial model away from selling a “good” to selling “time”--uptime, time savings, speed of delivery, or anything else that taps into the value of time to create something new and compelling for your customers.

• Rolls Royce sells more than cars; they also sell airplane engines. When they revised their sales model and started charging service fees based on “uptime” (the actual time the engines are flying in the air), their airline customers were thrilled. Airlines prefer to pay as their own cash comes in from their passengers and cargo instead of buying an engine up-front. Rolls Royce sells “hot air out of the back of the engine,” not the actual engines.