Hm, though to argue against myself
for a minute, it occurs to me that my unhappiness with e.g. Amazon Kindle books might be poetically summarized as "Kindle is like buying books from an airline's sales department." Non-refundable, non-tradable, locked to me.
So maybe there's more mileage in the idea of "airlinification" than I initially thought. Though Amazon gets away with it (to the extent that they do) mainly because their "convenience" argument is pretty strong for virtual goods: You don't have to warehouse the books, tote them around, re-buy them if your house burns down, etc. These selling points do not apply so well to airline tickets (though airlines will certainly try to sell you on the awesome convenience of non-tradable non-refundable e-tickets), let alone my metaphorical socks.
Still, though. More and more things can be virtualized or time-shared. It is not at all hard to imagine carshares like Zipcar going the way of airline pricing, for example. Yikes.
Rental car companies already use airline-like pricing schemes, with a mandatory minimum rental period of 24 hours. One of Zipcar's selling points is that their pricing scheme is simpler and more granular. If Zipcar changed their pricing scheme, they'd become just another rental car company in the minds of their customers.
I suspect that there will always be people who prefer the more straightforward style of pricing. After all, knowing exactly how much you're going to pay and knowing you won't be paying for any unnecessary hours counts as a feature for a lot of people. It's like buying a Linode. It might not be the cheapest option for all use cases, but it gives you peace of mind.
So maybe there's more mileage in the idea of "airlinification" than I initially thought. Though Amazon gets away with it (to the extent that they do) mainly because their "convenience" argument is pretty strong for virtual goods: You don't have to warehouse the books, tote them around, re-buy them if your house burns down, etc. These selling points do not apply so well to airline tickets (though airlines will certainly try to sell you on the awesome convenience of non-tradable non-refundable e-tickets), let alone my metaphorical socks.
Still, though. More and more things can be virtualized or time-shared. It is not at all hard to imagine carshares like Zipcar going the way of airline pricing, for example. Yikes.