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About
Notes and views on CRM, open business models, and what the Web means for customer relationships. [more]
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Speaking at:
IIR's Mobile CRM, Bupadest, Dec 2008
Telecoms CRM, CEM and User Experience 2008
Linkblog
Photos
The Bill and Steve Show
FINALLY HAVING WATCHED the Gates/Jobs debate at AllThingsDigital, I cannot convey my disappointment. What a waste of time! Half an hour into the show when I managed to discount the natural awe coming from seeing those guys, stepping down from magazine covers and actually alive, breathing, speaking, I realized that if you want to know what’s going on inside Apple or Microsoft, you really shouldn’t be paying too much attention to their respective icons. It was all PC, all warm and Uncle Fluffy-like. To tune in and expect a sign of conflict, or even simple competition, would have been a gross miscalculation.
On the positive note, it was a useful reminder that the software industry hasn’t begun with Google. Indeed, it’s been around for a couple dozen years now, and seeing those two had me thinking, maybe the industry has matured already and became slow and steady and, yes, boring. It’s easy to say that Flickrs and Tumblrs and Fkkers are the new paradigm-breakers, the new Microsofts and Apples, if you are 18; those two surviving proofs of evolution suggest that not all revolutions succeed in uprooting the old order. They are here to stay.
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.
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.
Quote of the day
“[O]ne thing I’m sure of, geeks need marketing. Especially in a world where everybody swears blind that a great programmer’s work is 10 to 1000 times better than an average programmer’s, and some people even have the research to back it up - but the only way for a great programmer to make 10 to 1000 times more money than an average programmer is for that great programmer to start their own company and become a great businessperson as well (or instead)” - Giles Bowkett
Yes, and even if you don’t want to run your own company, it still makes sense to be a good businessperson - in the sense that you understand the business you are in. And I’ve seen geeks reading Kotler more than I’ve seen MBA’s learning C++, so perhaps there’s an advantage to be explored here.
Not The End of DRM Just Yet
Just a quick note to the EMI/iTunes deal: let’s say you’re still reading books, right, and all of a sudden they come with a license saying you are only allowed to read them at home and not on the bus, and there are undercover detectives roaming the streets and scanning the buses and boy, if they ever catch you with a book in your lap while you’re on your way to work, you’ve got yourself a lawsuit!
And while some people complain, the masses just go with it ’cause, well, you can’t really say no to authorities, can you?
And after a while, those still in rebellion get their voices heard more and more, and gradually a wave of dissent gets noticed by the media and, eventually, by the masses. Then, because more and more people are copying books in their basement and giving them away to their friends, the publishers get together and put out a press release: you can buy our books for 25% more and you can read them anywhere you want! How about that!!!
What do you say to that, eh?
DRM isn’t dead yet. It won’t be until the publishers say, oops, it was a mistake, the overzealous accountants did it! Of course you can do whatever you damn please with the stuff you bought!
PS Yes, this being the real world, etc., I should unclench my teeth and say it’s better than nothing and perhaps something even better will eventually happen. Personally, though, I see more life in services such as Amiestreet that I wrote about: places where musicians and fans get together without too many men in dark suits breathing the same air.
Technorati Tags: drm, emi, itunes, piracy
Amiestreet: How To Resuscitate The Music Business
THE SEARCH FOR NEW BUSINESS MODELS in music distribution has been a long and tiring one. It’s been RIAA vs the pirates and whatever your position is, it’s hard to say which side is winning. The one that’s been losing is easier to spot: the musicians. Robbed by the recording industry dinosaurs AND the bittorrent generation jointly.
Which is why I so love Amiestreet.
It’s a perfect market. Bands upload their songs. They’re initially free for a download; as they get more popular, their prices goes up until it reaches a pre-determined ceiling (98 cents at the moment). The band gets 7o% of the rate. (which is like, what, 69 points more than they get from a label?)
You, a listener, buy a credit and spend it on songs you like. But it doesn’t stop there: for every dollar you get a matching number of a social-network currency called a REC, which is basically a vote that you can cast to support the music you like. That the number of votes you get is constrained is supposed to prevent artificial “inflation of popularity” by overzealous fans. Clever!
Plus: the songs you download are DRM-free, thank goodness!
This is an attempt I passionately support: to re-introduce elementary principles of free markets to the music business so that both producers (musicians) and consumers maximize their value while the role of the middleman diminishes. It’s free of the Napster anarchy AND the music label dictatorship. And, happily, it’s free of amateurism as well: I could find a track I liked in a matter of minutes (Plastic Mary, loved your songs!).
What they should do to take this even further is to create a channel for fans to connect with the bands. We’re not talking about Madonna and her gazillion bodyguards, hairdressers, lawyers and such: it should be much easier to reach a level of intimacy with a band that’s brave enough to release their stuff there. So, if the key business differentiator today is to “attract high quality online networks of interesting and engaged users“, where else to begin than here, in the marketplace of music? You can’t find more passion anywhere else.
Technorati Tags: amiestreet, crm 2.0, music, music business, plastic mary, bittorrent
Substance of Substance of Style
I AM READING Virginia Postrel’s Substance of Style, and it reads like a historical treatise depicting an era long gone. Specifically, I cannot remember a time when style did not play a significant role in our purchasing decisions; partly because of my poor memory, and mostly because the rapid explosion of the nineties and the sustained revolution that’s going on in the first decade of the new century has already created new traditions, new dogmas, new histories - who would bother going back the memory lane to the awful 80s? (definitely not me, since that was the dying phase of the totalitarian regimes here in the East - and style had no place here then). From my today’s point of few, the book is rehashing the obvious, even though it was first published in 2003! We’ve taken an even more unbeliavable leap in our desire to customize, personalize, and fashionize since then.
We’ve got the RAZR, the MacBook, and lots of stuff in IKEA with labels that stress out the fact that each piece of the furniture has a unique touch - made just for you. And we take it for granted (I do).
It’s this infinite variety of choices that businesses create that’s speeding up the transition to CRM 2.0 where customer isn’t an object of a transaction but a subject of a very complicated play. If Postrel’s book seems so obvious to me now, less than 4 years after it was published, I am optimistic as to when we ought to expect this to happen. Guys, it’s around the corner now, really!
Technorati Tags: Substance of Style, Virginia Postrel, crm 2.0
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