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| Thursday, November 16, 2006 |
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Remembering a free life 
| | Even though his politics sometimes rubbed me the wrong way, I loved his lucid thinking, his forceful expression, his good humor, and his faith in the power of individual effort, originality, intelligence, enterprise, independence and other human attributes that work best when they are least encumbered. To Friedman, markets were not abstract forces, but systems of energetic individuals and companies, doing good work. |
| | He liked the Net, too. One of my favorite quotes: The most important ways in which I think the Internet will affect the big issue is that it will make it more difficult for government to collect taxes. |
As promised, eventually
| | Sometime in the next week or two, after I'm done being completely overcome by responsibilities, I'll post some fresh photos of the usual stuff (sunrises, sunsets, scenes out the windows of airplanes), but with more info about how and why I made the shots, to answer all the folks who have been asking me for years to post tips. I promised I'd do that, and I haven't forgotten. |
This is why I want VRM
| | That's what I get every time I try to log into my bank account in my browser. The system could hardly be more broken or aversive. I'm not going to call them. Why? Just to get a reset password I'll forget again and probably won't work anyway?* |
| | I used to blame the bank — plus every other organization that knows me only through their customer "relationship" management (CRM) systems. (Let's see... there's Google, Yahoo, Flickr, the "merged" Yahoo and Flickr, Amazon, eBay, RackSpace, Tabblo, Technorati, Verizon, Verizon Wireless, Orbitz, Travelocity, Paypal, Budget, Hertz, Avis, Alamo, Linspire, Apple, Santa Barbara News-Press, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Skype, Sonos, YouTube, Second Life, Userland, SixApart, Wordpress, Dotster, Indra, GoDaddy, Geocaching.com, United Airlines, American Airlines, US Airways, CDW, Crutchfield, Wired, Gmail, J2, ZDnet, mytreo.net, Network Solutions, IDCommons, Hostlane, CES... to name a small percentage of all the CRMs that have ID/password combinations of mine and relate to me in only the most forgiving sense of that verb.) Yet, lame and isolated as many of these systems are, they aren't the problem. Just like mainframes weren't the problem before we came up with PCs. |
| | This is our problem. We're the ones in the best position to fix it. |
| | Our problem is that relationships with vendors don't work both ways. What we have had for decades are "relationship" systems that aren't, because they live entirely on the vendor side. They're all silo'd. Isolated. And they handle everything, but only for the one vendor. The customer relates to that vendor through a few hunks of authentication data (login, password, answers to questions for recovering lost logins and passwords...) and then interacts ("relates" is a gross exaggeration) inside a narrow and highly confined system that totally controls what the customer can do — and utterly cuts off any possibility of useful contributions to the company other than in through repeated purchases and whatever secondary data might be gleaned from the transaction and customer history. "Your opinion counts?" No way. They don't care what I think. They care what their survey results tell them. Huge difference. One relates. The other doesn't. |
| | The Identity Gang has been pursuing the challenge of getting to Single Sign On, or SSO. But actually relating is a much larger and more important problem. Identity is essential, but it only starts there. Now is a good time to look toward The Next thing. I think VRM is it. |
| | VRM should provide something on the customer's side that is ... what? I'm seeing a set of connection methods and data stores, or means of represnting data stores. Secure, of course. Under the customer's control, but supportive of whatever intermediaries the customer chooses to engage. A Vendor Relationship Managment system, or VRM. |
| | I don't think VRM should be confined to a browser, either. I think this is something that should work through a cell phone, a card, or any other device or representation that works for the individual. |
| | And it needs to be something vendors can relate to. I should relieve some of their burden, and make business better for them. |
| | I bring this up again now because (a) I want to post while the ire is hot, and (b) because I want to invite all parties interested in working on this to show up at the Internet Identity Workshop on December 4-6 in Mountain View. Let's fix this thing. |
| | * I did. It went into a phone maze so complex and discouraging that I gave up. |
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