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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
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Sometimes, Coffee Is Just Coffee
… and rose is a rose is a … who gives a damn.
via Chris Carfi - Starbucks is now offering a $1 coffee. Say what? Shocking, yes, but not unwelcome. I crave rich experiences and am willing to pay extra for the atmosphere, etc., but there’s something to be said about $5 cup of java. I’ve been a regular of Coffee Heaven here in Prague (even better than Starbucks), and you can pay more for a latte and cheesecake there than you would for a whole lunch with espresso at a nearby restaurant. Starbucks may have started the coffee-awareness boom and it might have just realized it’s gone too far. I would certainly hope so.
If I hear lovecat one more time, I’ll reach for my AK
Love is the killer app is the most annoying book I’ve read this book, and there were many. Its author, Tim Sanders, has deserved this rant largely because of his habit of prefixing many words with “biz” (such as bizcontacts, bizworld, etc.) without merit - their meaning is clear enough without it (reminds me of that horrendous “2.0″ suffix we’ve been seeing for way too long, too - I am dreading the “3.0″).
I tell you, to erase the experience of this book I’ve had to load Amarok with Tupac tracks. It’s this bad.
First of all, the book recycles arguments well known since Dale Carnegie’s book on making friends or whatever. I wonder if our collective memory is so shallow. All the good stuff you need to behave like a decent human being in a business environment (and everywhere else) can be found in the Bible.
Second, the Big Thought lies in gathering ideas in books, then being the unsolicited Know-It-All and quote them to our friends and expect a meaningful return on attention. It works when used sparingly and with caution. Mentioning a new book 3 times a week will just make you look like either an aspiring book critic or someone who can’t produce an original thought.
Third, the chapter on exchanging business cards. Yeah.
I don’t have a fourth, since I couldn’t bear the thought of never being able to justify the remaining hour I would have spent on finishing it.
HOWEVER…
It pays to read the highlights for a reminder that boundaries between our work and personal lives are becoming blurred. That it makes sense to nurture relationships and create value whenever possible, even without an immediate compensation, because those things will help our relationships and those will, in time, yield value to us.
It was written in 2002, so it feels a bit outdated already (it mentions Siebel as a vendor of SFA … come again?) (no word on blogs, etc.). I would argue that its title is the most valuable thing about it, and that it should be rewritten from scratch and consider not the relationships we have in our workplace but the relationships between companies (their representatives - sales reps, service reps) and customers and how the technocratic worldview (pragmatic value exchange) doesn’t work anymore because we’re seeking experiences, and those go far beyond exchanging cash for a product. And those involve emotions, though love is perhaps too strong.
But that would be a theme for another book. Pity the title has already been used.
The Coolness Factor
Firing up your office laptop, logging into SAP and screaming WOW: no, this doesn’t happen. Enterprise software is boring, and quite frankly I cannot understand where does the whole bunch of Enterprise Irregulars find the temerity to tell Scoble he was wrong to wonder, Why enterprise software isn’t sexy , and say he doesn’t get it. There is nothing to get, folks: enterprise software is boring, boring, boring, 99 percent of the time, and no, it doesn’t have to be; methinks Workday looks pretty cool (judging from the demos), and so does Salesforce.
And you know what? It’s not a coincidence I’ve picked up these two. SaaS is a disruptor in many ways, and one of them is getting rid of the internal IT and all its silly policies, long implementation times, and the inevitable hordes of consultants. It has to appeal to users.
But I digress. Enterprise Software is so horribly soulless and user-unfriendly due to a number of reasons:
- Purchasing decisions are made by paper-pushers. End users are usually not involved as they are “represented” by a somebody who hasn’t been at the frontline for a long time, won’t be using the software, and therefore doesn’t really know what it should do and how.
- Internal IT - too much work, too little appreciation = not much motivation. Group them with a “team” of hastily assembled junior Superheroes from Accenture, and boy, you’ve got no time for sexy; you are happy if the code compiles and does just barely enough so that you can move on to the next release.
- There is never enough time and money do to things right. Enterprises have a huge number of priorities they need to juggle, and making their employees happy isn’t nearly as important as making them productive (as if these two weren’t interconnected), and by productive the suits usually mean an insane screen with lots of grids and forms generated from database tables (100+ attributes to handle), so that the poor schmuck doesn’t have to navigate anywhere, he’s got everything “at his fingertips”, and he does and they bleed at the end of the day, but who cares.
Here I stumbled onto the answer: the Enterprise doesn’t usually look at its employees with the same CRM-fueled passion as it does at its customers. They are, after all, a column in the Expenses section. So why bother? They cannot switch to a competitor’s application should they dislike what they’ve been served. Damn, they can seldom change their desktop background; the cubicle slavery doesn’t allow for neither software choice nor simple self-expression.
I believe this is changing; SaaS is playing a huge role in it, and so are all the gadgets we buy that free our mind and scratch many itches. As we move from the purely utilitarian to the beautiful (compare the first CD players with PS3), the workplace is going to change, too, and so is enterprise software. In its own clumsy, passive-aggresive, uninspiring way.
PS For a sober look at the subject, read Jason Fried’s post on Why Enterprise Software Sucks.
PS II: I concur with Nicholas Carr:
By perpetuating a false dichotomy between the friendliness of consumer apps and the seriousness of business apps, all that Krigsman is doing is giving enterprise vendors cover for continuing to produce software that’s difficult and unpleasant to use. Give Scoble credit. He’s asking the right question, in his own strange way.
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.
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!
A Saturday Rant
I’VE FELT QUITE UNEASY about my job title lately. Senior Consultant, goddamit.
In a company, you’re supposed to climb the ladder or there’s something wrong with you. So you climb. And the higher you get, the more ridiculous you feel, or maybe you don’t ‘cuz you feel high. You’ve got status, man. Super-duper consulting chief honcho.
Could I just have something like “go-to guy” or “gets shit done” line on my business card?
Status is for cowards.
Presently unimpressed
HERE’S A SCOOP on Google’s upcoming addition to their Apps portfolio:
I’m sure many people wondered if Google will release a presentation tool, after building Google Docs&Spreadsheets. Well, the answer is yes, and the code-name of the tool is Presently (a play on Writely, the name of the online word processor bought by Google).
I am not surprised - Google has the ball rolling pretty well - and at the same time, I feel conflicted as to what to think. Technological marvel? It may as well be. But is it a step in the right direction? Office apps have matured to such a degree than any effort to start over would be gargantuous. Aren’t there other goals worth pursuing than re-doing what already works? I would hope so!
(via Pivotal Public Speaking)
Technorati Tags: presently, google apps
RE: rules of creativity
I LOVE the “how to be creative” essay written by Hugh McLeod over 2 years ago. One point I am not so sure is his #2: “The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to change the world.” Changing the world is a tempting proposition; in business and arts alike, though, you are more likely to make it if you aren’t afraid to use imitation. Also-rans have an undeservedly bad name!
And it’s not just about Microsoft for you Apple folks out there. Look: thoughout the history of classical music (now a stinky corpse), artists have followed up on one another so nicely you could almost connect the ending notes of A’s symphony to the opening theme of B’s. And that was long before mass-media and the internet! Early in the 20th century, composers wiped the slate clean and started anew; each developing his own syntax, semantics, and vocabulary. Without going into further detail, I am going to assert this was the primary reason why classical music became “classical” - ie, dead.
We are like charcoals, says our pastor, burning intensely when together and going cold when scattered. This is true for artists and entrepreneurs as it is for Christians. It’s the relationship economy, okay? No one flourishes in the void (does GapingVoid?)
Going back to our theme, I am not disputing the whole text or even the whole point #2; I am contemplating this bit:
Your idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours alone. The more the idea is yours alone, the more freedom you have to do something really amazing.
How many ideas can I claim to have originated? Sadly, not many. Maybe not even a couple. I cannot separate things I have said with those I have heard, and though I may re-mix and re-phrase to sound original, in the end I will have to give full credit to everyone I’ve talked to and had coffee with. So my interpretation of #2 is: own your ideas - and be humble. Somewhere, somebody is thinking the same thing. Which is why agree enthusiastically with #3: put the hours in. A company as well as a symphony is more a product of hard work than a brilliant idea that just happened to materialize.
Technorati Tags: creativity, gapingvoid
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