notes and views on products and people who make them

There’s a Niche Out There For Every Foolishness

JUST TO PROVE WE’VE ENTERED THE ERA OF ABSOLUTE CUSTOMIZATION: a Chinese town is remaking itself as a tourist attraction – a “women’s town” where women rule and “men get punished for disobedience”:

The motto of the new town would be “women never make mistakes, and men can never refuse women’s requests,” Chinese media have reported.

When tour groups enter the town, female tourists would play the dominant role when shopping or choosing a place to stay, and a disobedient man would be punished by “kneeling on an uneven board” or washing dishes in restaurant, media reports said.

There are a gazillion of different needs, and most of them have never been satisfied simply because it wasn’t possible to identify the people sharing a particular minority need.

That’s changed. Freaks and oddballs are letting themselves be heard (no offense intended). You’ve got a particular kink, you bet you are not alone. And somewhere, somebody is working hard to make sure you won’t spend the rest of your life in frustration.

This fragmented demand and the resulting fragmented offer isn’t going to be handled well by the traditional CRM (hey, ever tried to customize a Product Catalogue in Siebel?), and I suppose we need a new infrastructure for that: one that is decentralized, capable of ad-hoc connections, one that is capable of handling both structured and unstructured data. Today’s mashable web is just a preview of what’s awaiting us.

April 26, 2007 | Filed Under CRM, Enterpreneurship, Rants | Comments Off 

links for 2007-04-24

April 25, 2007 | Filed Under Links and Quotes | Comments Off 

Mission Critical, Really?

A JAS Gripen crashed in Sweden this weekend. The Czech Air Force has several of these, and the generals have grounded those used for training until the manufacturer explains the reasons for the crash. Supposedly it’s a “software thing”, quoting an unnamed pilot who’s admitted as much on tv.

Whether it was the plane’s software that caused the pilot to be ejected from the plane and the subsequent crash is subject to investigation. If it was, I wouldn’t want to be in the shoes of the poor guy responsible for that particular piece of code… but that’s beside the point.

For those of us who have been embedded in the “mission critical” world of banking & telco IT, it’s a much-needed reminder of “mission critical” can sometimes mean. And that there’s IT beyond the enterprise, that it takes brains much sharper than ours, and that even there, mistakes happen – and costly they are!

April 23, 2007 | Filed Under Software delivery | Comments Off 

Google Has Become Boring

THERE ONCE WAS WRITELY. Now it’s Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

Even earlier, there was Froogle. Now it’s Google Product Search.

I suppose when you are a #1 site you can’t afford to remain cool and geeky. Or can you?

Sad.

April 19, 2007 | Filed Under Enterpreneurship, Rants | Comments Off 

Amiestreet Update – The Rush!

THE SMART FOLKS AT AMIESTREET.COM keep up the good work. I’ve got a heads-up on new releases this Monday and was quick enough to grab Griffin House’s Upland while it was still free. I can imagine paying for this stuff anything between $10 – 20; it’s that good.

Smart tactics on their part:

  1. Seduce new customers with a promise of a truly fair price – the more people buy something, the higher the price.
  2. Keep them coming back for more – by giving them inside information so that they can beat the market.

This rewards existing customers and prompts people to look for new stuff – music that hasn’t been discovered by many yet – so the benefit extends to producers as well.

I like what I am seeing.

DISCLAIMER: I am not associated with Amiestreet.com in any way.

April 18, 2007 | Filed Under CRM | Comments Off 

Re: how well…, etc.

Hugh responded in the comments, and I feel obliged to add one last note.

Quoting from the (since updated) original post:

The “Microsoft vs Open Source” question doesn’t interest me so much. The question, “What/How does Microsoft have to do/change if it wishes to survive the next thirty years” interests me greatly. And not just Microsoft, either…

I’ll pretend I have a clue and offer the following observation:

Microsoft has a diverse portfolio. Some of its units, such as XBOX, have become almost independend brands, at least in the public perception. It’s quite likely that Microsoft in 2037 will bear little resemblance to how we know it today. Will operating systems still be as relevant as they’ve been so far? Or will they be as boring as any other infrastructure? Nobody gets excited about electricity anymore…

I think any big company that gets stuck in its business model is in danger of becoming irrelevant, and Microsoft knows that, and what they really should do is to increase competition among their divisions, either by actually splitting up or pretending to do so. The co-dependency of Windows and Office brands isn’t helping either one. Whether they’re internally thinking about it or even taking some steps I do not know. What I do know, however, is that Microsoft’s chief competitor isn’t Linux or Google: it’s their own weight, maturity, complacency. It’s tough to be a monopolist.

April 17, 2007 | Filed Under Open Source | Comments Off 

Re: how well does open source currently meet the needs of shareholders and ceo’s? (2)

ONE MORE THOUGHT on why I think Hugh McLeod has missed the boat this time.

Fact #1: ‘hacking something in your garage’ isn’t for startups anymore. Has it ever? You innovate or you go out of business.

Fact #2: businesses use software to breath, move, run, act. The agility of their software infrastructure determines their agility in the real world.

In that situation, you’d be foolish to trust anyone to be as agile as you need to be. As innovative as you must be. Changes come quickly and software vendors have too many balls in the air to keep track of your situation. Open Source weakens vendor dependency and empowers companies to respond to change with greater agility – because there are no secrets in the code. Anyone can take over if the original vendor can’t or won’t keep up with you.

That’s a value shareholders and CxOs should recognize.

April 17, 2007 | Filed Under Open Source | 2 Comments 

Re: how well does open source currently meet the needs of shareholders and ceo’s?

I DON’T ENJOY “PHILOSOPHICAL” DEBATES, and I wouldn’t jump into this one except that Hugh McLeod is a brilliant fellow and I wonder if I may be missing something.

He says:

If Open Source software is free, then why bother spending money on Microsoft Partner stuff? [...]

I know very little about software, so my hunch is that the reason Microsoft is able to make money, is simply that running a large business with 2000 people on the payroll requires very different ways of going about it, than just hacking together something in your garage. Open Source may be free [at least at first], but how well does it scale? How well does Open Source currently meet the needs of shareholders and CEOs?

You tell me. Anybody who has more insight than me [pro or anti Microsoft, I don't care], please feel free to leave a comment, Thanks.

I’m afraid the question is too general to inspire a meaningful discussion. What software are we talking about? Office? No comment necessary – Microsoft rules the game. Servers? Hey, doesn’t much of the web run on LAMP? I bet CEOs are quite happy about how their server farms do, even if they’ve never heard of Apache.

He’d need to get specific to even begin a conversation that would get us somewhere.

So forgive me if I pause now with a platitude (this being my answer to Hugh): Open Source isn’t about “hacking stuff in the garage”, it’s ultimately about transparency and freedom to configure the value chain the way your business needs it, and given how much businesses like to overstate their uniqueness, it’s no wonder they are adopting it wherever and whenever they can. There’s a thriving vendor market, and though there may be no Open Source billionaires just yet, that doesn’t mean the market isn’t real. It is.

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April 16, 2007 | Filed Under Open Source | Comments Off 

It’s About the Smile

I’ve had a funny experience in a supermarket.

The cashier was happy.

She didn’t just put on a fake smile: she radiated happiness. Throughout the one-minute transaction, she made me feel like she was genuinely delighted and honored by the privilege to serve me.

Surely unexpected from a person making minumum wage and barely scraping by.

Point to ponder: what kind of customer loyalty would a company earn if it treated ALL its customers this way, regardless of channel, circumstance, person involved in the interaction?

April 11, 2007 | Filed Under CRM | Comments Off 

Against the Code of Conduct

THIS IS MORE POLITICS THAN I’M WILLING TO ALLOW on this blog, but since it’s directly related to blogging itself, I have to take a position.

Why oppose the so-called “Blogger’s Code of Conduct“? It’s an overreaction. Trolls and hateful comments have been part of the internet culture since the Usenet, and no amount of regulation is going to eliminate them. And if it could, what price would bloggers have to pay? The administrative burder related to ensuring civility in comments would be especially taxing for sucessfull bloggers.

Every blogger should be clear about his or her values. And let the readers decide whether individual commenters respect them or not. And let the blog owner decide how to handle the obnoxious ones. It works – no badges necessary!

April 9, 2007 | Filed Under Links and Quotes, Me & You, But Mostly Me, Rants | Comments Off 

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