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Monday, November 29, 1999
You know how we write this page? By typing right into our browsers. The main difference between what we (the four Cluetrain authors) see and what you see is a button with three words: "Edit this page." Any one of the four Cluetrain authors can come in and do what he likes, from any browser on any platform. It doesn't require client software. It doesn't frost you with a line like this one from Blogger: "If you use Internet Explorer 4 or 5 for Windows, here's an even quicker way ..." You don't even need to know HTML (unless you want to do fancy stuff like bold faces and graphical runarounds). Here's the significance: Manila lowers the webtop publishing threshhold approximately to zero. It accellerates the shift in market power from supply to demand. It gives everybody who wants to speak a voice. It's a clue gun of a very large caliber. Bottom line: it changes the game. What game? Consumer hunting. That's the game marketing has played ever since Sales discovered market also worked as a verb. Hence the game of "targeting" munitions called "messages" at "consumers" (which they further diminish with labels like "seats" and "eyeballs") looking for "penetration," "impact" and other sporting effects. Marketing could play this game without any resistance because it was entirely an instrument of Supply, which has controlled markets through the entire Second Wave. About all Demand could do was write letters, call toll free numbers, subscribe to Consumer Reports and otherwise behave in the powerless manner of fish in a barrel. No more. We have seen The Third Wave and we are it. The Internet isn't just another business development. It's a monster meteor that has smacked into the world of business and pushed out a great tsunami of demand. The Net equips demand not just with more ways to buy, but more ways to talk. Now Demand has email. Demand has browsers. And starting this week, demand has Manila: a way to talk — to publish — right through the browser itself. Now more than ever, Demand can supply more information than Supply itself. And in much more credible voices. But we trivialize Manila's effects if we see it as just another way to adjust a power balance between economic abstractions. Better to see it as a very significant step toward restoring the original and true nature of markets — as places where the human beings behind the economic abstractions gather to share ideas, and not just to sell stuff to each other. More in Doc's One Newbie's Take on Manila.
Yesterday we said "We'd be glad to hear from anybody who can update us" about Amazon's apparently clue-averse customer service system. Instantly, we heard from Lawrence Lee, who runs the great weblog Tomalak's Realm. He pointed to this link at the Washington Post. There are responses to this message:
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