Technology – Page 8

Category: Technology (page 8 of 10)

Dawn of the Living Infrastructure

So how do we get out of this place?

infrastructure_of_living_dead

Let’s face it. Mike Arrington’s problem with the iPhone, Om Malik’s problem with AT&T, the FCC’s problem with Apple + AT&T together, my own problems with Cox, Dish Network and Sprint, David Pogue’s problem with the whole freaking cell phone industry … all of these are a great big WAAAH! in the wilderness of industrial oblivity to what customers want. We’re in the graveyard of what Umair Haque calls the zombieconomy. We’re living in Night of the Living Dead and complaining that the zombies want to eat us alive.

What they really want is to strap us down while they bleed us for small change—tiny amounts of ARPU. They do this, for example, by forcing us to sit through “The … number … you … have … dialed … eight … zero … five … seven …” until a small ka-ching happens somewhere deep in their billing system, so you get bled whether or not you’ve left (or received) a message. David Pogue:

Is 15 seconds here and there that big a deal? Well, Verizon has 70 million customers. If each customer leaves one message and checks voicemail once a day, Verizon rakes in — are you sitting down? — $850 million a year. That’s right: $850 million, just from making us sit through those 15-second airtime-eating instructions.

It was JP Rangaswami (disclosure: I consult JP and his company, BT) who first pointed out to me that the primary competence of phone companies isn’t technical. It’s financial. They’re billing machines. That’s their core competency. And it was r0ml who pointed out, way back when he was with AT&T Wireless (before it became Cingular, and then the AT&T we all know and hate today), that phone companies arrived at the holy grail of micropayments decades ago. They don’t charge small amounts, but they know how to add them up, and round piles of microminutes into billions of dollars.

A better movie metaphor is The Matrix. We’re all wet cell batteries inside giant phone company billing systems. The machines took over a long time ago, and they’re still running the world.

Not that acting like machines does them much good in the long run. Umair Haque:

Profit through economic harm to others results in what I’ve termed “thin value.” Thin value is an economic illusion: profit that is economically meaningless, because it leaves others worse off, or, at best, no one better off. When you have to spend an extra 30 seconds for no reason, mobile operators win — but you lose time, money, and productivity. Mobile networks’ marginal profits are simply counterbalanced by your marginal losses. That marginal profit doesn’t reflect, often, the creation of authentic, meaningful value.

He adds,

The fundamental challenge for 21st Century businesses — and economies — is learning to create thick value. We’re seeing the endgame of a global economy built to create thin value: collapse. Why? Simple: thin value is a mirage — and like all mirages, it ultimately evaporates. In the 21st Century, we’ve got to reconceive value creation.

Constructive Capitalists are disrupting their rivals by creating thicker value. Thick value is sustainable, meaningful value — and a new generation of radical innovators is wielding it like a strategic superweapon.

Rick Segal thinks Mike Arrington‘s CrunchPad is one of those superweapons. Here’s what the Crunchies say will look like:

Sez Rick,

No, this probably isn’t the next Apple or Motion Computing, but here’s the secret.

Let’s assume there are just 1000 people out of all the TechCrunch people in the world that want this device. If this device gets made and sold to 1000 happy people and the result is a manufacturing world and process which can now do these “one off” type devices, the game changes.

That’s why I want this device to get made. It begins a high profile (and positive) disruption at the point of manufacture and that can mean exciting things to you.

One way to blow up silos and walled gardens is de-verticalize industry itself. Not by making it horizontal (that’s too abstract), but by making it personal. Rick’s angle here is to go all the way to the source, and make manufacturing personal.

That’s what Rick thinks Mike & Co. are doing here. I also think the Crunchpad is compliant with what Dave says in this post here:

I’ve been through this loop many times, this is Mike’s first. The only platform that really works is a platform with no platform vendor, and that’s the Internet.

Right. The Crunchpad, as I understand it (and the Crunchies have explained it) is a Net-native device. Standards-based. Commodity parts. Full of open source stuff. The platform is the Net. The vendor is TechCrunch, but trapping users isn’t their game. They’d rather have thick value than thin.

So how do we contribute, besides paying cash for goods? By being constructive customers, rather than passive consumers. That’s what Rick is calling for here, and why we, as free and independent customers, can choose to support something that uses the Net as the platform, and is built to be user-driven.

Think about it. Is the Crunchpad crippled by any deals with a major vendor of any kind? Is it locked into any phone company’s billing and application approval systems? Is it locked into any one industry’s Business-as-Usual? No.

So who is in the best position to contribute to its continued improvement, besides the Crunchies themselves?

You. Me. Users. Customers.

We can drive this thing. Even if what Dan Frommer says is right, and Apple comes out with the world’s most beautiful pad ever, and pwns the whole category, there’s more vroom for improvement in the Crunchpad, because Apple’s device will be closed and the Crunchpad will be open. Or should be.

You listening, Mike?

Health Care vs. Risk Snare

July 15, 2009 / Doc Searls / 3 Comments

So I’m a guest on the latest TWiL (This Week in Law) podcast. Lots of VRM links at that link, below the topic, “How modernization of health data management is changing the health system.”

Here’s what I tried to say, or would like to have said better than I did.

Health care now lives in the networked world. That world is comprised of data. And the network is, as Kevin Kelly perfectly puts it, a copy machine. The result is, as Bob Frankston perfectly puts it, a sea of bits. Health care needs to adapt to this world, embrace it, take full advantage of it.

This imperative is at odds with the calculation of risk that is at the heart of our health care system here in the U.S. It would not be unfair, or even wrong, to call our health care system a risk management system. To see what I mean, imagine removing the insurance business from the middle of it.

Of course risk is always involved where odds must be calculated, and much of health care is legitimately about calculating the odds involved in a given condition, procedure or whatever. But huge hunks of our health care system, in addition to the culture surrounding it, is built around managing risk that has little to do with what our bodies and minds might require. Here are where we have fears of exposure, of disclosure, of mistakes, of all kinds of stuff that wouldn’t be a worry if we didn’t have to weigh the costs of knowning too much or too little in one circumstance or another, because something (a procedure, a doctor or a patient’s ass) might not be covered.

The nature of the networked world — of the big copy machine that constantly enlarges the sea of bits — is to reduce the risk of knowing too little, of having insufficient information, of reconciling data conflicts, or even conflicting judgment calls.

In the long run we must abandon a system that values risk more than care. I believe we have the former, to a dangerous degree, today. We will eventually require the latter. And that requires a health care system that essentially insures everybody.

Health Care Relationship Management

April 22, 2009 / Doc Searls / 6 Comments

Health 2.0 is going on today and tomorrow in Boston. So is HealthCamp Boston. Says Mark Scrimshire, about the latter,

We are using CoverItLive as one of the methods of helping you track the event.

We are encouraging all participants to Blog, Tweet and upload photos and videos using the #HCBos and #SocPharm hashtags.

Click Here for the CoverItLive feed or follow the CoverItLive Feed on Mark Scrimshire’s EKIVE blog: http://ekive.blogspot.com/

The CoverItLive RSS Feed is here.

Wish I could be there. (Boston is our home during the academic year, but rigtht now we’re getting some R&R at our perma-home in Santa Barbara.) Meanwhile I suggest that everybody who cares about VRM consider the matter of HCRM — Health Care Relationship Management. (A term I just made up. HRM might be better if it wasn’t about HR.) Health 2.0’s concern is user-generated health care, its about page says. That puts it in VRM territory right there.

Here’s the agenda for Health 2.0. HealthCampBoston is more on the BarCamp model. A DIY agenda.

Among the biggest topics in HCRM in recent years has been PHR, for Personal Health Records. Search for that, with quotes, and you get over half a million results. Leave off the quotes and you get fifty-five million results. The more specific (and less confusing, with Physicians for Human Rights) EHR, for Electronic Health Records, gets nearly five million results.

This is a huge topic, of a degree of importance that verges on the absolute. It’s also perhaps the most sisyphean of VRM categories. I find that daunting, but there are many professionals in health care and related fields who have been doing a great job pushing big rocks long distances. These people are heroes, even if they don’t know or acknowledge that. Here are some links to get started:

John Halamka, also @jhalamka
Enoch Choi, also @enochchoi
Brian Ahier, also @ahier
ePatientDave, also @epatientdave, who also blogs at ePatients.net, where I just found this not-too-oldie, but goodie
ePatients white paper
David Harlow, also @davidharlow
Mark Scrimshire, also @ekivemark
Greg Masters, also @2healthguru

Send me more, or comment below, and I’ll add them here.

Tags:

#ehr
#emr
#HealthcareIT
#health20con
#hrm

There’s much more, of course. To get thinking rolling among the VRMerati, consider this mind-bender at ePatients.net., and this follow-up, both by ePatientDave:

Imagine that for all your life, and your parents’ lives, your money had been managed by other people who had extensive training and licensing. Imagine that all your records were in their possession, and you could occasionally see parts of them, but you just figured the pros had it under control.

Imagine that you knew you weren’t a financial planner but you wanted to take as much responsibility as you could – to participate. Imagine that some money managers (not all, but many) attacked people who wanted to make their own decisions, saying “Who’s the financial planner here?”

Then imagine that one day you were allowed to see the records, and you found out there were a whole lot of errors, and the people carefully guarding your data were not as on top of things as everyone thought.

Also this piece of intelligence, about Twitter and hospitals.

VRM and the Four Party System

April 12, 2009 / Doc Searls / 33 Comments

I think we can get some clarity about VRM — and growth of customer power in the marketplace — by re-positioning what we’ve been calling “parties.”

Among numbered parties the best-known one today is the third party. Wikipedia currently defines a third party this way (at least for the computer industry):

Third-party developer, hardware or software developer not directly tied to the primary product that a consumer is using
Third-party software component, reusable software component developed to be either freely distributed or sold by an entity other than the original vendor of the development platform

In general, a third party works on the vendor’s side of the marketplace. However, the vendor is not generally called the “first party” (except in the game business, as Wikipedia says here). In fact, the most common use of the term “first party” in business is with insurance, where the term refers to the insured. (The insurer is the second party.)

So I see this as an opportunity. Let’s give numbers to parties involved in customer relationships, starting with the customer. In the process we can unpack some distinctions between categories of work within the VRM development community.

The first party is the customer:

The second party is the vendor:

The third party is vendor-driven, and on the vendor’s side:

The fourth party is customer-driven, and on the customer’s side:

Together, they look like this:

Here’s how the r-button might represent both sides of the marketplace, and how those sides are attracted to each other:

There are lots of ways one can look at this.

For example, on the left half is VRM, on the right half is CRM.

VRM is about enabling the first party. It is also about building fourth-party user-driven (and within that, customer-driven) services, which make use of first-party enablement.

We can also substitute user for customer, and organization for vendor, since the scope of VRM far exceeds the vendor-customer relationship continuum. Thus fourth parties are user-driven and not just customer-driven. The picture here would look like this:

Fourth parties will provide many services for first parties. In fact, VRM should grow large new fourth party businesses, and give new work to large old businesses in the same categories. (Banks, brokers and insurance companies come to mind.) Native enablements, however, need to live with first parties alone, even if fourth parties provide hosting services for those enablements.

Fourth parties also need to be substitutable. They need service portability, just as the customer needs data portability between fourth (and other) party services. That way whatever they can provide can be swapped out by the user, if need be.

A good example of how this works is email. Before the Net took off in the mid-’90s, there were many email services. Customer choice was between silos:

None of the email companies could crack the interoperability problem. That had to come from the user’s side, by way of geeks who defined email via protocols that saw workstations as the units that mattered. While servers were involved, they could also live anywhere. Both SMTP (which appeared first in RFC 821) and POP (which first appeared in RFC 918) were born in the early 1980s, out of the need for workstations to communicate with each other.

What matters for our purposes is that email enables individuals to do two things that are VRM hallmarks: 1) be independent of other entities (including both providers and vendors), and 2) be better able to engage with those entities.

Even to this day, anybody can host a mail server — or even a Web server — on their own device. Yet there are big businesses in hosting email, and most users opt to host their email on those services out in various clouds. So, just as mail and Web servers and services are Net-native, so should VRM enablements be Net-native.

Silo mentality is mostly gone from Net-native businesses. But it’s still going strong in lots of brick & mortar business categories. For example, the hotel business. Right now that business still looks like your-choice-of-silo:

With the customer in charge, it should look more like this:

Here’s how all four parties fit together:

For travel, third parties include Orbitz, Travelocity and other intermediaries operating mostly on the vendor side of the marketplace. They wouldn’t have to stay there, of course. They could become instruments of customers as well. There can be blurring between third and fourth parties.

But, as customers get more power, fourth parties are bound to flourish — and not just because they’re located on the side of the customer and his or her money. Fourth parties will flourish because they will help more intelligence flow into the marketplace, and help the customer both manage and apply that intelligence.

Fourth party business will bloom for every company that wishes to be user-driven and customer-driven. This will include countless new companies, of course. But there will also be fresh work for existing companies that already side with the individual in some way. This group includes banks, real estate agents, travel agents, insurance companies… any business that wants to side with free customers, because they know in their bones that free customers are more valuable than captive ones.

Even traditionally locked-down monopolies, such as phone and cable companies, are in good positions to provide, or help provide, fourth party services — simply because these companies already have relationships with millions of customers. (Not to mention old and in some cases dying core businesses.)

What will keep fourth parties from turning on customers, and becoming essentially third parties for the big silo-maintaining vendors — in other words, wolves in sheeps’ clothing?

The only answer is native individual power. This is why it is critical to provide individuals with tools that enable their independence. A tool such as PayChoice‘s “pricing gun” cannot be something provided by only one company. It has to belong to nobody and therefore to everybody, just like the existing suite of native Internet protocols. In fact, these native capabilities should enlarge the roster of protocols and other enablements that comprise the Internet’s suite of benefits for everybody.

Kinds of work

There will be many new development projects and organizations involved in making VRM happen. Some are already underway and have moved far downstream. In the course of this, there is a need to distinguish types and scopes of development efforts, and types and scopes of organizations.

I want to leave the latter open for now, and concentrate just on development work. Here the challenge is reconciling closed and open source work — and to help migrate some of the former into the latter.

There are now perhaps a million or more open source code bases in the world. Most are small. Some, such as Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl and Python, are large and familiar. Nearly all are not run by companies, or even by .orgs. The programmers who contribute to the code base are inherently independent, even if they work for a company with an interest in the project. Such is the case with the many Linux kernel programmers who work for IBM, Red Hat and Oracle. It’s also true of Monty Widenius and David Axmark, who founded MySQL and came with it to Sun.

Open source code essentially belongs — in the sense that somebody has control over it — to the individual developers who contribute to it. The closest expression to ownership is usually the license. Developers on a free software or open source project like to pick a license and move forward without any further concern about legalities, including issues of ownership. “Intellectual property” is anathema to them. The only form of intellectual property that interests them much is copyright — which is why the free software folks invented copyleft, which carries forward with open source as well.

Both free and open source software possesses qualities we call NEA: Nobody owns it, Everybody can use it, and Anybody can improve it. These qualities make that code generative: that is, maximally supportive of the largest variety of uses. In his book The Future of the Internet — and How To Stop It, Jonathan Zittrain shows how generative code and standards work by locating them at the waist of an hourglass with many possibilities both below and above:

While all code is in some ways owned, it is controlled by those who write it. These include contributors, committers and maintainers. Some projects use just one or two of those terms. A good example of one using all three is here. Some small projects just use one term or none at all. Practice varies widely It is always understood, however, that somebody, or some small group of people, decide which code gets added to the base. The Mine! Project is one open source effort within VRM. ListenLog will be another. There will be many more.

What matters for VRM purposes is that free software and open source projects are inherently independent. Even if a company hires programmers to write code, both the code and its authors will be independent of those paying for it. This means the employed programmers, or anybody, can work on the code, and do whatever they want with it — provided it passes muster with the maintainers (or whoever decides what code gets into the base).

Closed source code for which there are no open source ambitions will play roles in many fourth party services and applications. Where we face challenges with VRM is with closed source code that does have open source ambitions. If we want to open closed source code, how do we do it? Craig Burton uses this illustration in his discussions of various options:

These options are faced where companies already have code under intellectual property burdens, and where code development is already far downstream and decisions about what to release and where to put it (such as in code repositories, with choices about versioning, etc.) impact administrative as well as developmental overhead. There are existing organizations that can help with this kind of thing. Work has already begun on our own as well.

A Personal Note

While I’m not a developer (the only code I know is Morse), I’ve been covering open source development for the better part of two decades, and have been working toward VRM for most of my adult life. I’m 61 years old, and most benefits of VRM won’t appear until after I’m gone. So I take a long view, even though I am as impatient as anybody to make things happen soon.

What I want for VRM is maximal enablement of first parties, and maximum business for the other three parties — especially the fourth parties that will grow on top of the enormous because effects of first parties in the world.

Because effects are positive externalities of public goods that support boundless economic activity. Think of them as private benefits of public goods. The Internet Protocol, for example, is a public good. While nobody makes money with the Internet Protocol, the whole world can make money because of it.

We want the same kind of leverage from first-party enablement of VRM. None of us will make much, if any, money with the native enablements of customers, and users, in the marketplace. (Though we will save much money and hassle.) Perhaps $trillions will be made because of those enablements.

In respect to what happens with first and fourth parties, I locate my interests primarily with the individual, and with enabling the individual. For that reason I look for minimal organizational restrictions on how that happens. I just want to see as much open source development as we can possibly bring in. This also means I welcome all kinds of organizational activity outside the VRM “kernel,” in the fourth party space. In fact I think we need that very much, and have for a long time.

My perspective here is something like that of Linus Torvalds, who makes a point of only caring about kernel development, and not about what’s done with the kernel. When asked about what happens outside the kernel, Linus often says, “That’s user space. I don’t care about user space.” (The distinction is explained at that last link.) The scope of my interests, however, is much larger. I do care about what happens outside the individual’s “kernel space.” I especially want to see business grow in the fourth party space, which to me is analogous to Linux’s “user space.”

But I don’t have the time or the inclination to care about everything. I need to focus. And what I want to focus on is enabling individuals, and getting enormous because effects out of that. So I rely on others to do the organizing outside of the individual’s “kernel space.” This does not involve giving up power on my part, but locating power outside my own immediate interest area, out where others are more interested and competent than I am.

In respect to those, I see my main job as helping make clear where “kernel space” ends and “user space” begins. Hence this draft. Hope it makes sense to all of you.

Bonus Links: Making a New World — my chapter in O’Reilly’s Open Sources 2.0; and Net Worth, the 1999 book by John Hagel and Marc Singer that introduced the infomediary concept (a fourth party, basically), way ahead of its time.

And special thanks to Hugh McLeod for the fun images used here.

Is VRM radical?

March 27, 2009 / Doc Searls / 3 Comments

In this post at ReadWriteWeb, Bernard Lumm interviews Richard de Silva of Highland Capital Partners (a neighbor of ours here in the Boston metro’s northwest quarter). It’s about advertising, primarily. Richard and Bernard both agree that advertising is moving more toward “performance-based” models. “Closer to the sale.”

It’s a sell-side conversation, framed by the need to sell goods, move inventory, do branding, and all that. Which is good. Advertising needs all the help it can get, and both Bernard and Richard are clearly ahead of the curve on the topic.

I’m less comfortable with these remarks in Bernard’s post:

Some recent blog chatter says that online advertising is doomed. The best reasoned case for this is made by Doc Searls (of ClueTrain Manifesto fame), who is touting his radical Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) as an alternative. Searls is an academic (Harvard Berkman Center). Another academic, Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations and Information Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, kicked up a storm with his guest post on TechCrunch titled “Why Advertising Is Failing on the Internet.”

Academics are often right, if you don’t mind waiting an eon or two for their pronouncements to be realized. In business, you need a more pragmatic view.

First, I didn’t say that advertising is doomed. I said it was a bubble, and has been for a long time. I explained that in After the Advertising Bubble Bursts, and among the comments below it. (As well as in many prior posts, to which I linked in that one.)

Second, while I’m flattered to be called an academic, technically speaking I’m a fellow at two university centers. What got me those fellowships was my work as a writer and a tech activist, not as an academic (by any definition). For most of my adult life I’ve worked in the private sector, including many years in the advertising business. From the mid-80s to the late 90s, Hodskins Simone & Searls was one of the top tech advertising agencies in Silicon Valley, much of that time occupying a whole building in downtown Palo Alto. So I know a few things about the topic.

Third, and most importantly, if VRM is radical, it’s not in an oppositional way. It’s not against advertising, or CRM. It’s merely an effort to equip customers with better tools for expressing their wants and needs, and for engaging with sellers. I think VRM can eliminate the need for much guesswork in the marketplace, and — as I said in my post — most advertising is guesswork. But that doesn’t mean guesswork, or advertising, goes away. But it does change. If you don’t believe me, listen to Bob Garfield of Advertising Age:

There is no longer a need to warn of a gathering Chaos Scenario, in which the yin of media and yang of marketing fly apart, symbiotic no more. There is no need to seed doubt about the internet’s prospects as an advertising medium, nor otherwise be a prophet of doom.

Chicken Little, don your hardhat. Nudged by recession, doom has arrived.

The toll will be so vast — and the institutions of media and marketing are so central to our economy, our culture, our democracy and our very selves — that it’s easy to fantasize about some miraculous preserver of “reach” dangling just out of reach. We need “mass,” so mass, therefore, must survive. Alas, economies are unsentimental and denial unproductive. The post-advertising age is under way.

This isn’t about the end of commerce or the end of marketing or news or entertainment. All of the above are finding new expressions online, and in time will flourish thanks to the very digital revolution that is now ravaging them. The future is bright. But the present is apocalyptic. Any hope for a seamless transition — or any transition at all — from mass media and marketing to micro media and marketing are absurd.

The sky is falling, the frog in the pot has come to a boil and, oh yeah, we are, most of us, exquisitely, irretrievably fucked.

ReadWriteWeb is a micro medium. So is Digg, in which Highland is an investor. They may be big on the Web, but they’re micro next to the giants of mass marketing that have kept Madison Avenue in business.

What keeps ReadWriteWeb and Digg in business isn’t Madison Avenue. It’s Highway 101.

My point: VRM is also about Highway 101. It’s one more stage in the not-very-seamless transition to whatever succeeds mass marketing.

What Bernard misses here is that VRM is also pragmatic. This is why I’m very insistent that VRM be built on strong open source foundations. Open source work is always pragmatic. That’s its nature.

But VRM is also unproven. People can knock it all they want and not be wrong. Yet.

Our job is to make the pudding that proves our ideas. I beg the patience of Bernard and others while we do that. I promise it won’t take eons.

EmanciPay: a new business model for newspapers

February 5, 2009 / Doc Searls / 7 Comments

Rex Hammock is right to gripe about the newspaper turtles pulling their heads in their shells and complaining that readers aren’t paying for the goods papers offer for free online. In that post he runs down some of the drumbeats he’s been hearing:

“The notion that newspapers should become financially endowed institutions was published a few days ago in the New York Times. (My response.)
Buried in this Q&A with Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, is the suggestion that the NYTimes is considering once-again putting some of its content behind a pay-wall in the future.
Philadelphia° Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky tees-off on free-lunch readers and says they should start paying $5 a month to read the Daily News online — and, oh yeah, newspapers should get $1 billion from Google.
Former Time magazine managing editor Walter Issacson writes at Time.com that newspapers should revisit the idea of micro-payments that might replicate the iTunes model. Pay, say, a nickle per story you want to read. (He’s riffing on the idea floated by David Carr of the New York Times last month.)…”

Here’s the problem with all of those systems: they’ll all be different, silo’d, inconsistent with each other. And doomed to fail for all those reasons.

Here’s the solution: One new system that makes it as easy as possible for readers to pay for the goods, but voluntarily, on their own terms. This new system would turn consumers into customers by giving them the pricing gun. And here’s what’s also cool about it: We’re already working on it at ProjectVRM. It’s called EmanciPay. (Note: when this was written, it was still called “PayChoice”. DS – 1 September 2009)

It’s still early. But it will get a lot less early if some of these pubs stop complaining and put their shoulders (and their wallets) behind work that’s already going on.

What’s completely screwed about this picture

January 21, 2009 / Doc Searls / 16 Comments

So I got an email today from Forbes, with the subject “You are Important to Us”. It says this:

Dear Subscriber:

Forbes values you as a customer and your opinions are very important to us. We are conducting a study and would like to include your opinions.

The survey will take about 10 minutes to complete and we think you’ll find it interesting and enjoyable. Your responses will be used for research purposes only and will be held in the strictest confidence.

Simply click on the link below to visit our survey.

Click here to take the survey [The link goes to a long address that begins http://forbes.puresendmail.com/print.]

Again, we thank you so much for participation.

Sincerely,

Bruce Rogers, Chief Brand Officer – Forbes

You are receiving this email because you registered at Forbes.com LLC. and signed up to receive third party emails To manage your preferences or change your delivery address, please click here.

You may also email your opt-out request to privacy at forbes.net or send your request in the mail directly to:

Forbes.com LLC

Attn: Privacy Administrator
90 5th Ave. 6th Floor
New York, NY 10011

To review our privacy policy click here.

Copyright 2008 Forbes.com LLC TM

I thought, “Hey, I’m busy, but I like Forbes, and I’m inclined to cooperate, even if I hate most surveys and would rather relate to Forbes in a less one-sided and impersonal way. So I punched on “Click here to take the survey”.

The first step was one that asked me what my title was. I have several, but none of them are from the lexicon of corporate hierarchies. So, next to “other” I wrote “fellow”. Because that’s what I am, here at the Berkman Center. (I’m also Senior Editor of Linux Journal and President of my own small company, but I went with “fellow” because I get Forbes where I live near Berkman and not at my home office in California.)

The first survey page told me the thing would take about ten minutes. That’s a lot, but I thought, “Okay, I’m still game. Let’s see how fast we can make this.”

It was over in one second. Or however long it took for the survey server to send me to a page with the title “Thank You – InsightExpress.com“. Its entire contents were this:

Return to Your Originating Web Page

Respondent Privacy Statement

I hit the back button and it went nowhere. Then I clicked on the address in the email. That timed out. So did I.

This is the point at which one might be tempted to write to Bruce Rogers or the nameless Privacy Administrator, but Forbes has gone out of its way here to avoid human contact (no email address for Bruce, a surface mail address for ATT:Privacy Administrator — both of which scream “WE ARE AVOIDING YOU. PLEASE COOPERATE.) But that would be weak and supplicating, and I have no interest in being either. I’d rather be the good Forbes subscriber that I’ve been for years and attempt to make constructive human contact instead.

I’ll do that three ways. First is with the headline above, plus links and other bait that might get the attention of Bruce Rogers or one of his factota. [Note: I posted this at 1:12pm, and Bruce responded personally at 1:56. Well done!] Second is with an email to some folks I know at Forbes. Third, and most importantly, I’ll try to explain the VRM angle on this.

VRM is Vendor Relationship Management. It’s how customers manage relationships with vendors. (Or with other individuals, or with organizations of any kind — such as churches or governments.)

Most vendors are familiar with CRM, for Customer Relationship Management. I can’t tell if a CRM system was involved in this little exchange, but a failure of this kind is certainly within the scope of CRM’s concerns. (To visit those, check out the CRM sites for SAP, Oracle, SalesForce, Amdocs and Microsoft, which are the top four companies in an $8+ billion business.)

Right now VRM is a $0 billion business. But in the long run it’ll be big, and it’ll improve the CRM business along with it, because it’ll give CRM something more substantial than mailing addresses to relate to.

A number of development communities are working on VRM solutions right now, but rather than talk about those I’ll just say what I’d like here. Not from Forbes, but from VRM developers. If Forbes or any CRM companies want to help with that, cool.

I would like a simple dashboard that tells me what I’m subscribed to and what I’m not — both for print publications such as Forbes and for email subscriptions of every kind. I would like to have global preferences that would govern how I relate to each of those publishers, and how they relate to me. For example, I would like to throw a switch that says “No” to all third party mailings, both to my font door and to my email addresses. When I establish a relationship with a new publisher, or publication, or supplier of any kind, I would like them all to know, as a matter of policy, that I don’t want them to waste their time, money and server cycles by sending me junk mail of any kind. And that I don’t appreciate having my own bandwidth, cycles, disk space, rods, cones and time wasted dealing with any of it. I might give a global or selective thumbs up to surveys, provided I also have a standard way to send error messages and other feedback to survey sources.

On the positive side, I would also like to open conduits through which productive interaction could take place with the publishers, authors and circulation officials whose “content” I pay to get. (And even those that I don’t pay.) I would like a simple, straightforward, universally understandable way to do this, across all “content providers”, so I don’t have to relate only inside each provider’s silo. (By the way, we’re already working on change-of-address, to pick just one subcategory of subscriber-publisher interaction that can be a pain in the butt for everybody. That last link is a working draft, by the way. More work is happening off-wiki.)

That’s just one part of what we’re doing at ProjectVRM. But it’s one I’d like the “content providers” and CRM folks out there to know about. Because it’s going to happen anyway, and I’d suggest getting interested, and perhaps also involved, sooner rather than later.

VRM + CRM

December 6, 2008 / Doc Searls / 11 Comments

Last night my wife asked me what we mean by “Free customers are more valuable than captive ones” and “equipping customers with tools of independence and engagement”. I thought about it and said, “Knights are more valuable than serfs.”

When a company speaks of “capturing”, “acquiring”, “owning” and “locking in” customers, they’re treating customers like serfs. What we want to do with VRM is make customers into knights: to arm them with status, respect, armor and weapons. But not to do battle against sellers and their fortifications. Instead, customers and sellers both need to fight against ignorance surronding the idea that the ways they can engage should be limited to the relatively few imagined by today’s CRM systems.

I’ve noticed a change in the last few months at the CRM wikipedia entry, and at CRM company websites. It seems to me that the CRM business is getting back to its original ambitions, which were all about understanding and helping individual customers — and improving the seller’s offerings in the process. There’s a limit to what can be done only from the sell side, or from researching groups rather than engaging individual customers. Some of the relationship burden needs to be borne by the buy side, by individual customers. They need tools of engagement for that. So it’s VRM + CRM, not VRM vs. CRM.

Which brings me to Paul Greenberg’s CRM 2009 – Part 2.1 – Can’t Believe I Forgot These (in which he adds two items to his 2009 CRM forecast). They are: “(8) “Feedback 3.0″ will become an intimate feature of most companies’ customer strategy” and “(7)Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) releases its first tools for the customer in 2009”. Here’s what he says:

For those of you who don’t know, VRM is something that has been on the table for a long time and has been championed by Cluetrain Manifesto writer and Web pioneer, Doc Searls. I call it the “labor movement” for customers. It is the customer’s side of that conversation control we’ve been talking about. A VRM tool, thus is one that is unlike a CRM 2.0 tool. A CRM 2.0 tool would be something a vendor produces for the benefit of a company to engage its customers. A VRM tool would be something the customers would use to control how they relate or any or multiple vendors. If you’re interested in this thinking, go to the Project VRM wiki at Harvard Law that Doc Searls, an amazing dude, runs and read up. Worth your involvement with. But the one thing that has had me a little concerned (as an ardent VRM believer) is that there haven’t been much in the way of tools that have at least been produced and labeled as VRM related. One of the first that can be applied as a VRM tool, though not called as such, and a great one to start, is Cerado’s Ventana – a mobile social aggregation tool that’s used by companies and customers – it has a hybrid kind of approach. Take a look at its uses here. But there isn’t much else. I think that 2009 will begin to see the evolution of the tools of what is already an established body of thought becoming increasingly accepted. But the tools need to come and this year is the year they will.

This is a good call. It’s also why we’ve been cautious about publicizing what the community is up to. There is in fact much work going on — around peer-to-peer relating, search, personal data stores, paychoice (where the buyer pays what they want, on their terms, for goods that are otherwise free — such as podcasts, broadcast programs and music), and symbols representing actions and relationship states. This next year we should see ProjectVRM get beefed up at the Berkman Center, the start of serious research around some of VRM’s core theses, and the formation of an independent nonprofit centered on VRM. (One model for this is Creative Commons — a concept that was the brainchild of Larry Lessig, back when he was at the Berkman Center).

We’ll also see more VRM workshops, on the East and West coast of the U.S. and in Europe. Some will be focused on vertical categories such as VRM+CRM.

So stay tuned. It’s going to be a fun year.

Answering tweeted questions about VRM

November 20, 2008 / Doc Searls / 2 Comments

So, with the help of vangeest and Twitter Search for #vrmevent, I’m addressing questions tweeted from the virtual floor here at the VRM Event in Amsterdam. Here goes…

vangeest: @dsearls: retweet @vangeest: #vrmevent: what is the relationship between the good old B2B marketplaces like Ariba and VRM?

As an idea VRM owes something to B2B, for the simple reason that B2B relationships tend to be between equals. Thus they can be rich and complex as well. B2C tend to be simplified on the B side, mostly so maximum numbers of templated Cs can be “managed”. Iain Henderson has talked about how there are thousands of variables involved in B2B VRM, while only a handful with CRM, which is B2C.

VRM essentially turns B2C into a breed of B2B — to the degree that both terms no longer apply. VRM equips individuals to express their demand in ways that B2C never allowed, and B2B never included.

But VRM is not a site, or a marketplace. That makes it different from Ariba, eBay, or online marketplaces. VRM may happen inside of those places, but VRM is not about those places.

Most importantly, VRM is not something that companies give to customers. It’s something customers bring to companies.

zantinghbozic: #vrmevent ichoosr: vrm is socialism 2.0 – http://mobypicture.com/?pcg0qr

This reports a provocative tease by Bart Stevens of iChoosr in his opening slide. I don’t agree with the statement, but his deeper point rings true: it involves a shift in power in the marketplace, from producers to consumers. Except I wouldn’t use the word consumers. I’ll explain that later.

VRM in the Financial Times

September 15, 2008 / Doc Searls / Comments Off

Making customers more revealing is a fresh piece in today’s Financial Times. It was written by Alan Mitchell, who has been an advocate of VRM since long before it acquired that acronym. An excerpt: “As individuals increasingly use digital data to organise and manage their lives, they will demand software tools and services to help them gather, store, protect, analyse and use this data efficiently.”

There’s more there. Read on.

Meanwhile, here’s a bonus link on S-curves and’better buyers’.