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Monday, November 27, 2006
Wake up, Neo 
| | Oddly, marketing (including advertising and PR) is not as powerful as you might think. Given the extraordinary inefficiencies involved, the actual influence exerted by marketing (and by advertising and PR in particular), is remarkably small. Even the accountabilities introduced with pay-per-click advertising still involve ratios of "impressions" to clicks that run in the lottery range. |
| | Far more powerful is a belief, held by nearly everybody in the developed world, that the best markets are captive ones. In the Free Software and Open Source movements we call captive markets "walled gardens" or "silos". But to most producers in the developed world, these are ideal. And to most consumers, they are business as usual. |
| | Even after the Net obsoleted closed on-line systems, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft continued to silo instant messaging inside their own walled gardens. In 2006, there should be no excuse for this. |
| | Yet there is. We continue to believe, as both producers and consumers, that silos are okay. And worse, that a "free" marketplace is one where you get to choose the best silo. |
| | We see this in the US today with our "choice" of services from phone and cable carriers. We even think the Net itself is a grace of telecom and cablecom carriage. After all, those are the guys we pay to get it. Those are the guys who have gradually increased our connection speeds. |
| | Even the most broad-minded techies can get trapped inside the conceptual silo constructed by the telecom and cablecom carriers. As I write this, the debate over "Net Neutrality" is conducted almost entirely inside that silo. |
| | The carriers claim to be fighting government regulation, when in fact they have known life only inside a regulatory habitat they built themselves and continue to control through an exceptionally powerful lobbying apparatus. Together with the lawmakers and regulators they control, the carriers have created what Bob Frankston (a father of both the spreadsheet and home networking) calls the Regulatorium. |
| | The Regulatorium provides the building codes for telecom and cablecom silos. Telecom (including cablecom) "reform" is entirely about changing the building codes to make the silos more competitive with each other-not to free the captives of those silos or to blow the silos up altogether. |
| | To the Regulatorium, a "free market" for Internet service means you get to choose between a cable and a telephone provider. That's it. These carriers can no more appreciate a truly free market than an agent in The Matrix can imagine a world not run by machines.... |
| | You have to be free to see how absurd silos can be. You have to see markets as wide-open spaces opened by ubiquitous relationships, and potential relationships, between digital devices and the human beings who use them. You have to see unrestricted possibilities for the people and organizations putting those devices, their applications and their data to work. Those possibilities lose their limits once you set your mind free of the notion that a free market is just a choice of silos. |
Then meet me outside
Flying higher
| | I remain astonished that a Midwest employee cleaning the plane found said homework, took the time to give it to someone who could find the owner, lookup their contact information, make a call, obtain the shipping information, place the papers in a FedEx package and send it our way. Everyone involved must actually care about the customer. What a concept. I hope that these words, in some small way encourage others to fly Midwest. There is indeed, no better care in the air. |
| | In an unrelated matter, I recently left a laptop AC adapter in the United Red Carpet Club at Logan airport in Boston. When I called they said they had it, and pleasantly offered to ship it back to me if I provided my Fedex number. I did. Haven't seen it yet, though. |
Hammered horse hoof, in a bun?
Abuse case for VRM
| | Is your pricing competitive, intuitive and fair (not the cheapest, I¹m happy to pay a fair price for good service)? |
| | Even better if you can provide me with both UK and French numbers on the same account, with no ridiculous international¹ roaming charges If so please contact me via this blog. My family currently spends approximately £150 per month on mobile phones, so we are a reasonably good potential customer... |
| | This is what I want to buy. Who can sell it to me? |
| | This is Complex Search. People aren¹t going to rely on any one vendor or reference point, unless they have an absolutely trusted guide like a brother or daughter or college roommate to point them in the right direction. They are going to check out different sources, browse multiple websites, collate and corollate a lot of information from a lot of different places. Then, after they have searched and narrowed their needs down to the details, they can put it in the form of a digital RFP and see the power of VRM kick in. Zing! A Market of One. |
| | VRM is still evolving. Questions and answers of many varieties must work their way through the community, from people¹s and companies¹ needs to draft technological frameworks, APIs, protocols, and working code. Good stuff. |
| | Somewhere in there, I¹m confident Complex Search will meet VRM and lots of real value will be created for people, vendors, and innovators alike. |
Weekbeginning
| | Got a lot of good stuff backed up. Watch Linux Journal for the bulk of it. |
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