Cloudonomics: The Business Value of Cloud Computing, + Website

On Time

Robert Buzzell, of the Harvard Business School, and Bradley Gale, of the Strategic Planning Institute, created a comprehensive database—PIMS (Profit Impact of Market Strategies)—to conduct research into the performance of hundreds of companies and thousands of strategic business units in these firms and determined that “the most important single factor affecting a business unit’s performance is the quality of its products and services, relative to those of competitors.”11 Superior quality correlated with higher prices and market share growth, in turn driving economies of scale leading to higher margins.

Quality, then, is good, but what is it? It can be aesthetics, brand, unique, distinctive materials, customer return on investment, emotional value, function, perceived quality, personal preference, practical value, price, responsiveness, service quality, technical quality, transaction value, trust, or who knows what. Frequently, however, it is tied to convenience, which in turn is related to time.

Paco Underhill, the CEO of Envirosell, a retail consultancy, argues that the “single most important factor in determining a shopper’s opinion of the service he or she receives is waiting time. . .a short wait enhances the entire shopping experience and long one poisons it.”12 The impact of waiting time on service quality is not just of hypothetical academic interest: Americans alone spend tens of billions of hours waiting each year.13 Making things worse, perceptions of waits can ...