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Turning the customer journey into a virtuous cycle

July 13, 2013 / / 2 Comments

Traditional CRM typically looks at customers this way:CRM cycleIt’s a cycle. One of the reasons we started ProjectVRM is that actual customers are hard to find in the CRM business. We are “leads” for Sales and Marketing, and  “cases” for Support. At the Orders stage we are destinations to which products and invoices are delivered. That’s it.

Oracle CRM, however, has a nice twist on this (and thanks to @nitinbadjatia of Oracle for sharing it*):

Oracle Twist

Here we see the “customer journey” as a path that loops between buying and owning. The blue part — OWN, on the right — is literally the customer’s own space. As the text on the OWN loop shows, the company’s job in that space is to support and serve. As we see here…

… the place where that happens is typically the call center.

Now let’s look at how this journey looks in our lives, in terms of how much of the time we own stuff and how much of the time we shop for it. The real ratio is closer to this:

kolskycyce1

And that’s not an exaggeration, since we own everything 100% of the time and shop only a small % of the time.

Now let’s pause to consider the curb weight of “solutions” in the world of interactivity between company and customer today. In the BUY loop of the customer journey, we have:

  1. All of advertising, which Magna Global expects to pass $.5 trillion this year
  2. All of CRM, which Gartner pegs at $18b)
  3. All the rest of marketing, which has too many segments for me to bother looking up

So, in the OWN loop we have a $0 trillion greenfield. This is where VRM started, with personal data lockers, stores, vaults, services and (just in the last few months) clouds.

Now look around your home. What you see is mostly stuff you own. Meaning you’ve bought it already. How about basing your relationships with companies on those things, rather than over on the BUY side of the loop, where you are forced to stand under a Niagara of advertising and sales-pitching, by companies and agencies trying to “target” and “acquire” you. From marketing’s traditional point of view (the headwaters of that Niagara), the OWN loop is where they can “manage” you, “control” you, “own” you and “lock” you in. To see one way this works, check your wallets, purses, glove compartments and kitchen junk drawers for “loyalty” cards that have little if anything to do with genuine loyalty.

But what if the OWN loop actually belonged to the customer, and not to the CRM system? What if you had VRM going there, working together with CRM, at any number of touch points, including the call center?

This is more than a simple dream. One of the coolest things to happen in the VRM development world is this insight, based on actual technology: everything you own can have its own cloud, and each can live inside your personal cloud. Your stuff doesn’t need to have embedded smarts. You can put your things’ smarts inside clouds of their own. Manufacturers can also include clouds along with everything they sell. Inside that cloud can go all the touchpoint contact data required for a genuine relationship, plus useful extras such as service manuals and shortcuts to product updates.

This means the product itself becomes the platform for relationship between the customer and everybody on the sell side, from manufacturer to distributor to retailer to service company. As I explained in this HBR post, that platform — the product’s cloud — is the level table where all those parties sit, at the grace of the customer. Because it’s the customer’s space.

One tablecloth for that platform is the TalkTag. It’s a simple QR code, like the one on the right. The pioneering company here is Kynetx, through its SquareTag service. It’s a simple way to give anything you have a cloud of its own. Scanning a TalkTag is one way to visit a thing’s cloud, which is also a programmable space. If your thing is lost, you can program it to provide contact information through somebody’s smartphone when they scan it. (Which I have done, and it works.)

You can also program it to, say, notify the call center when you scan it. For example, I want the TalkTag I just put on my cable modem to notify Time Warner Cable when I scan it. If Time Warner Cable’s CRM system is listening (which should be easy enough to make happen), it can send back a message to my phone, telling me there is an outage in my neighborhood. Or, in the event that there isn’t an outage, the “I’ve been scanned” message from me to Time Warner Cable can jump past stages in the company’s IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system and get me straight to the right person or automated response. That might be, “You need to download new firmware,” or “We have three new service tiers you might want to know about,” or “We see you haven’t paid your bill.”

I have shared this kind of scenario with two call center companies recently, and they liked it a lot. In fact they like the whole idea of VRM systems on the customers’ side that can lighten the burdens of relationship (and open opportunities) for both sides.

The customer journey — his or her experiences of owning and buying — will include more than just interacting with call centers. We use the things we own in countless ways that might be useful to share with others, including the companies that make and sell stuff — and not just through “social” systems like Facebook and Twitter, over which we have little or no control.

We should also be able to integrate data from products that don’t relate but should. In the Quantified Self world, for example, there is a standing need to synthesize data from many devices and databases. This need  cannot be solved by asking Nike, Fitbit, Withings, RunKeeper and the rest of them to all make their data un-silo’d and combine-able. And doing it in “social media,” whose only business is advertising at us, won’t work either. We need means of our own.

In the VRM world we’ve been saying the user needs to be the point of integration for his or her own data since Joe Andrieu first expressed that insight in 2007. Now, with personal clouds, in 2013, it’s starting to look possible. In fact the personal cloud, and the whole OWN loop, can also be a platform for intentcasting toward the BUY side.

The OWN side is also where all the privacy technology also sits, chiefly because it is distributed. It is here also that we hold the terms, preferences and policies we express when dealing with companies sitting across the tables set between us.

An interesting case that lies between buying and owning is relationships with service organizations, such as utilities. What we own here is own side of an ongoing relationship. Equipment of our own may be in there, or may not be. Either way, the use of a service — in our homes, cars and pockets — is what we at least control, even if we don’t own it.

So clearly we need a common platform for personal clouds, and for the things we put in them. That platform needs to be small, lightweight, distributed and open source. Right now I see one candidate for that: CloudOS, which is the brainbaby of Phil Windley. (Here’s a search for CloudOS and Windley. Lots of stuff there.) If you’ve got some other hacks, point them out in the comments below.

If we look at the customer experience from the company’s side again, this graphic from Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore does a nice job of framing the possibilities:

Across the table set in a personal cloud, customers can feed back good intelligence to every one of the loops in that graphic. And, because that data arrives directly and voluntarily, it has far higher quality than inferential data gathered by marketing’s many surveillance methods.

It also re-frames relationship and loyalty, as real things rather than as words marketing recites inside its own echo chambers. It will reduce marketing’s urge to manipulate, and advertising’s urge to personalize in the absence of conscious and voluntary signals welcoming it. The customer journey will thus turn into a virtuous cycle rather than the arduous one it is today.

It can also create a demand chain that can work in tandem with the supply chain, providing far better feedback at every stage. I could go on, but I want to get this up before the latest in the series of Important Calls that punctuate my life. (And they are all Good Things, trust me.)

Bonus link.

* In the comments below the post that follows this one, Ray Wang points to Esteban Kolsky as the original author of this graphic. As I say in my comment below Ray’s, I did hear that from Nitin Badjatia (of Oracle and formerly of Right Now), but I didn’t remember it when I wrote both posts in a hurry. Again, it is the verbs — BUY and OWN — that make the image especially useful for VRM, because they are the customer’s. I don’t yet know if those verbs are Esteban’s or Right Now/Oracle’s. Let me know and I’ll give credit where due.

Save

Loose links

July 7, 2013 / / 1 Comment

Midata Innovation Lab Launches. By Alan Mitchell at  Ctrl-Shift. Pull-quotage:

The Lab is a world first in three ways.

  • It’s the first time individuals will be empowered as the point of integration of data about their own lives. Financial transactions, energy consumption data, phone data and lots of other data sets including previously uncollected data such as individuals’ plans, preferences and intentions will be gathered and orchestrated by individuals, around those individuals.
  • It’s the first time that some of the infrastructure individuals can use to protect, manage and control the sharing of this data will be tested in anger: personal data stores.
  • And, for the first time, organisations will be able to play with the data, on a permissioned and controlled basis – data that gives them a genuine single customer view, a view that spans many aspects of the individual’s life, not just relating to their dealings with that organisation – to innovate new services.

Follow the Midata project at @midataBIS, and visit Midatalab.org.uk.

Also by Alan and Ctrl-Shift: How to value personal data.

Personal Cloud London Meet-up: Thursday, July 11, 2013 from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM (BST). Hosted by Iain Henderson and Peter Stepman.

Personal Data and CloudOS, by Phil Windley. Pull-quote: “You could imagine things like openPDS or personal.com serving as a foundational store for the CloudOS PDS without applications needing to understand or know their specific APIs. I recently demonstrated how Dropbox can be linked into CloudOS. The PDS could provide a consistent API for some or all of these.” Also by Phil: Facebook for my stuff.

Start controlling your data, by Jay Deragon. Pull-quotage:

…our medical records are stuck in silos and difficult for different providers to access. Yet patients do have rights to their records and because of technology you can collect and store your records (medications, health history, treating physicians, hospitals, recent lab reports etc. etc. on a wristband or a necklace in a tiny USB Medical Alert Drive. Think about downloading this kind of data to a cloud and having it accessible through a device you wear.

There are other tools in the marketplace for users to begin to gather their own data but it is still far from what should be made available if only the suppliers understood the value they could create by unleashing data from their silos. Anytime you create more value for buyers and value that saves them time, money and enhances their life you are do so by enabling them to do it with their own data.

That is the opposite of using the buyer’s data to create more value for limited selfish gains and calling it competitive advantage.  By empowering the buyer with their own data you are in fact creating more value for your business by expanding your marketplace.

That is called creating intangible value. Of course that is something you can’t see but know it is real and must believe it is so in order to see and make it tangible.

Lunch with Alibaba: If C2B Replaces B2C, Then What Happens to B2B?. By Michael Cole in Mingtiandi. Pull-quote: “According to Zeng’s vision, e-commerce in China, and around the world, is moving toward a Dell-style model, which he terms C2B because it is driven by the consumer, wherein the buyer makes the decisions about what is on offer, and companies will compete to supply these products in the fastest time and at the lowest price.”

Centrify CEO on Dropbox, KNOX, Microsoft, and the future of identity, by Matt Rosoff in CiteWorld. Pull-quote: “Soon, we’ll have to add another ‘BYO’ to the list — BYO Identity.”

Exchange Rate: Want someone’s data? Then what are you going to offer them in return? Colin Strong examines the quid pro quos of the Intention Economy. By Colin Strong in Research. Pull-quote: “Will the emerging personal data ecosystem make people less likely to simply give away their information to research firms?”

CVS App Brings Home Hard-To-Get CRM Data, by Evan Schuman in StoreforntBacktalk. @tdotrob calls it “an article straight from The Twilight Zone “.

What can people do with data that companies can’t? By Cheryl Snapp Connor in Forbes. Pull-quote: “Think about how much better we could be as customers if we — and companies we hire to help us — had access to all the data collected from us. We could look not only at how we spend our money, but at how we can spend it better. We could get a lot smarter, and so would the companies with which we have genuine rather than coerced relationships. And we could do betterintentcasting: that is, advertising exactly what we want, to the open marketplace, favoring companies we know will respect us. This would eliminate a huge amount of guesswork on the marketing side. I mean, who better to qualify us as a lead than each of us ourselves?”

 

VRM videos

July 1, 2013 / / Comments Off on VRM videos

First Retail

Here is a collection of videos about VRM and related subjects, in roughly reverse chronological order.

First, a series of well-edited excerpts from Disrupting Retail 2013, which was hosted by First Retail in New York City. Here’s an outline:

  1. What is Disrupting Retail?
  2. Amazon’s Product Recommender Systems
  3. Big Data Enabled Intention Management and the Customer Experience
  4. Moving from Personal Data to Individual Intention

The sessions were led by Gam Dias (@gammydodger) of First Retail, with Andreas Weigend (@weigend) and myself serving as sounding boards for the collection of forward-looking retailers gathered around the table. (That’s the two of us in the shot above.) Lots of excellent grist for retailers, VRooMers and everybody else who cares about the future of business (which, let’s face it, wouldn’t be business without retail). Bonus link.

Second, Phil Windley on building trillion-node networks. Within those might be your network, with your own Internet of Things in your own cloud. Bonus video: The cloud needs an operating system.

Third, from the State of the Net (#SOTN) conference in Trieste last month, four videos:

There were a number of others as well, which I’ll put up when I find them (or they find me).

Fourth, some others from the last year and more:

VRM growing in the garden of privacy concerns

June 14, 2013 / / 2 Comments

With Swedes: Closet VRM activists?, T.Rob gives us a typically deep VRM post, exploring new territory, or old territory in a new way. The context (and the subject of an interesting thread on the ProjectVRM list) is the news behind headline of a Simon Davies post: Sweden’s data protection Authority bans Google cloud services over privacy concerns. Sez T.Rob,

So the big problem with privacy, VRM tools and the cloud isn’t that the technology needs to be invented, but rather that the current IT culture assumes the vendor has rights rather thanprivileges to harvest and exploit your data and that you must opt out rather than opt in.  If you start with an assumed right to the data, then of course the apps that get built ignore existing privacy enhancing technology.

T.Rob raises some creative existing solutions to password problems — solutions that have thus far been outside of VRM conversations. A concern I have, within VRM conversations, is framing solutions in terms and contexts of the existing marketing system, which is getting more and more complicated by the day. For a better look at that, see this post from January, and Don Marti’s first comment there, which points to this post here.

Having spent most of the last month outside the U.S., what I gather is that privacy is just as big a deal elsewhere — just a somewhat different deal. Here privacy is seen in terms of prophylaxis — and sometimes not-very-good prophylaxis. (Do Not Track, for example, is like hanging garlic on the door of your browser to ward off vampires.) In Canada and Europe it’s seen as an essential attribute of civilized life: one that must be designed into software, services and infrastructure. Leading influences on this approach are Ann Cavoukian, the Information and Privacy Commissioner for Ontario, and her office’s Privacy By Design initiative.

In fact we’ve had privacy by design for a long time in the physical world. Clothing, for example, is a privacy system. We use it to cover our “privates,” among other things. But, while we’ve had civilization for thousands of years, we’ve had the Net for only a couple decades or so. We have a long way to go. But we’ll get where we’re going faster if we’re not re-inventing the same wheels.

And I think we’ll get there better if we ground what we do in a clear understanding of what privacy is, and why it needs to guide the stuff we create and improve.

Can C2B customers lead in a dance with vendors like B2B customers do?

June 7, 2013 / / Comments Off on Can C2B customers lead in a dance with vendors like B2B customers do?

That question came to mind when I read Inside Facebook’s Fantastic Plan To Dominate Cisco’s $23 Billion Market, by Julie Bort, in Business Insider. The gist:

To recap: OCP launched two years ago to create “open source” data center hardware. That means hardware vendors like HP, Dell and Cisco don’t control the product designs. Instead, customers like Facebook and Goldman Sachs do.

OCP is the Open Compute Project.* What matters about the project, for our purposes, is that it models a way for a customer to relate to a vendor: taking the lead in the dance, rather than just following.

A question for VRooMers is, Can we as individual customers do the same thing? I’m thinking we can. One way is through personal clouds, including scenarios such as the one Phil Windley describes here. I am sure there are many others. So I’ll leave detailing those up to the rest of you. 🙂

*BI, like too many other ad-funded Web publishers, doesn’t link to OCP, but instead to its own page full of stories about OCP. This is unhelpful, selfish and at variance with nature of the Web itself.  More about that here. (BTW, I’m guessing that the choice not to link is BI’s policy and not Julie’s, and would welcome correction on that.)

 

VRM help is where you find it

May 27, 2013 / / Comments Off on VRM help is where you find it

As Dean Landsman tweets here, a lot of suff out there is VRM without saying so. (Which is cool; it doesn’t have to.) The example toward which he points is How can we provide better customer service? Create software that lets customers serve each other, by Ashley Verrill in Gigaom. The summary:

As consumers increasingly turn to social media to both praise and criticize brands, those brands can’t possibliy respond to all the feedback. The solution is to empower customers to speak on their behalf.

Her piece begins,

Recently I was asked a question following a presentation that suddenly made me realize social application developers are missing a big opportunity in customer service. I had just finished speaking at the global HP Social Support Summit, when an audience member took the microphone and asked, “Do you know of any software that lets community members respond on behalf of companies on Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms?”

I do, and more on that below. Meanwhile, Ashley unpacks the problem requiring this kind of question:

The current customer service model is moribund

One of the biggest reasons this idea struck me is that the current model just isn’t working. In one study I conducted, major brands such as Coca-Cola and Wells Fargo responded just 14 percent of the time when they were asked questions via Twitter. This is a big problem when you consider more than half of Twitter users expect a personal response within two hours of sending a question or complaint, according to a report by Oracle last year.

This is a scaling problem that can be partially answered by equipping more employees to respond to requests from customers. Ashley sees customers themselves — “community members” — taking up the rest of the slack:

Existing, active community members can be the perfect candidates to respond for companies on social media for two reasons: For one, they’re already enthusiastic about your products and so can be good brand ambassadors; and two, they’ve proven their zeal for answering questions from other customers already.

Take this HP community member, for example. He spends upwards of 30 unpaid  hours a week responding to queries in their discussion forums. The software I’m suggesting would essentially empower “wb2001″ and thousands of other similar customers like him to respond to questions on social media (in addition to the community that exists already).

This hypothetical technology could still leverage all of the tools that make communities so effective – things like gamification and automated alerts. Also, social listening tools could filter out messages that would be better suited for an employee response. This could include messages from customers that are particularly angry, or questions that would require a technical expert.

This would lead, she concludes, to “empowering your brand advocates to create a sea of new discussions that never would have existed in the first place.”

What would do the empowering, exactly?

Among VRM developers, I see one company that does exactly what the HP audience member asked for. The company is Directly. Here is its mission:

A Better Way To Get Help.

Directly makes it easy to get fast, personal attention from experts who know different companies inside and out. Our community of experts work independently in their own free time. They earn rewards and reputation, and can cash out their rewards or donate them to one of the non-profit causes we support.

  • Our support site helps customers get better customer support — so customers can spend less time dealing with support and more time enjoying their life.
  • Our mortgage site helps homebuyers and homeowners — so more families can buy new homes or stay in the ones they love.

Directly launched publicly in December 2012 with a network that reaches 3.2 million customers monthly and has already helped 35,000 airline, bank, cable and wireless customers with a 97% response rate and an average response time of less than 10 minutes.

So whether you need to evaluate the best options, resolve an issue or just get things done, Directly is a better way to get help straight from the experts who can help.

As for software for making her scenario work, I think it would have to be independent of the world’s HPs, but would work with any or all of them.

For example, let’s say I wish to leverage my expertise with these things:

  • Canon 5D camera
  • 2000 Volkswagen Passat station wagon
  • Sangean ATS-909/Radio Shack DX-398 radio
  • Garmin eTrex Legend HCx GPS
  • Starbucks’ Saeco and Barista espresso machines

Rather than be empowered by each of those companies to speak for them, I might like one standard and non-proprietary way I could provide help for users of all of them. Or that would give customers a way of notifying the marketplace (including the corporate CRM systems, plus help systems such as Directly, plus anybody interested in helping without an intermediator) of a need for help.

Is that way out there yet? There are a zillion fora for a zillion products and services already. Some are hosted by the companies themselves, and some are out in the wild. But all I can name are to some degree centralized. What I’d like to see is something decentralized, but capable of working both with customers and with any of the CRM systems already in place from providers like Salesforce, IBM, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics and the rest of them.

Maybe something like that is out there already. If so, let us know.

Loose links

May 25, 2013 / / Comments Off on Loose links

I’ll be flying shortly to Italy, for the State of the Net conference in Trieste later this week. (Here’s the English version, the program, the hashtag: #sotn13.) I’ll be on a couple of panels and giving a keynote on personal clouds, which are emerging as center of control for individuals doing VRM. Meanwhile, here are some links I’m accumulating around VRM topics…

Mainstream Media

Webstream Media

Tweets

BTW, while I’m glad that copying and pasting linky text from a browser window into the composing space here in WordPress mostly works, I hate the way all kinds of formatting cruft comes along with it. Normally I make the time to de-cruft out all the <div> and <span> jive, and maybe I will later today or tomorrow; but I don’t have time right now so I’ll let it stand.

VRM at IIW

May 7, 2013 / / 1 Comment

We had a packed house yesterday at VRM Day 2013a — more than fifty people — prepping for IIW , which starts today and runs for two more at the Computer History Museumin Mountain View.

IIW is an unconference. No keynotes, no panels, no sponsors controlling the agenda. At the beginning of each day, particpants (who aren’t just “attendees”) choose the topics they want to talk about, and from there on it’s all breakout sessions in separate rooms. So here are some of the session candidates we put up on the whiteboard(and also on the wiki at the first link above):

  • Intentcasting
  • Governance
  • Personal Clouds in general
  • Interoperability mapping
  • How to get 4th parties interested in verticals, e.g. health care, government, retail) “Medicine cabinet” instead of wallets
  • What average joe/jane use case(s) will drive adoption?
  • Use case deep dive — An active session, attendees simulate the use case communications between the device, pcloud, vendor, etc.
  • standards/patterns
  • Next-gen SSO (e.g.Persona)
  • Legal Hacks & License harmonization
  • Wallets & apps for transactions, photos, etc. Bitcoin as a VRM money clip, safe deposit box… (see session from the last IIW)
  • Tracking and ad blocking, and harmonizing methods and experiences
  • Bringing 4th parties into verticals, e.g…
  • Health Care VRM — “medicine cabinets” rather than “wallets”
  • Real estate
  • Banking (including credit cards, payments, transactions)
  • Retail
  • Sovereign vs./+ Administrative identities
  • Terms and policies (Customer Commons’ work, plus Patient Privacy Rights)
  • Symbols (e.g. around privacy)
  • XDI + KRL, messaging & events
  • Internet of me and my things
  • Drummond, for Respect Network:
  • Discovery “DNSSIC for #pclouds”
  • Respect Connect “Facebook connect without the downsides”
  • Dictionary seminars
  • Personal data pain points, e.g. filling out forms
  • Collect useful techs/APIs

There are lists within that list, but my patience and connectivity aren’t up to it, so I’ll leave that be for now.

Identity is personal

May 1, 2013 / / 3 Comments

It’s as simple as that.

Identity is not corporate. That means no company is going to “win” at personal identity, any more than any company can win at being you or me. It makes no sense.

But meanwhile, there’s this big war going on over identity, that Mike Elgan of CultOfMac covers (from the Apple side) in Why the ‘i’ in iPhone Will Stand For ‘Identity’. Writes Mike,

Google honcho Eric Schmidt came right out and said it: “Google+ was created primarily as an identity service.”

And Om Malik nailed it when he said: “The real power of Facebook lies in controlling connected identity.”

Both Google and Facebook made big pushes to turn their social networks into solid identity services. And both those attempts have largely failed so far.

But Apple can win, Mike says. Here’s why:

I think Apple can succeed where the social networks failed.

The reason is that Apple has a better deal for users. The social network proposed both a small stick and a small carrot: Use one account and use your real name because then everything is better. That approach failed.

Apple’s proposition is much better: Use the Identity iPhone, and stop keying in passwords, credit card numbers, billing information and more. As you cruise through the Internet, all the doors will open for you and you can securely use and buy and access anything you want without any work.

How Apple Will Use the Identity iPhone

Once you’ve associated your actual fingerprint with your iPhone, your iPhone becomes you — better than a photo ID, better than a signature, better than a password.

Today, a swipe of the finger on an iPhone conjures up the 4-digit passcode lock. If you spend some quality time with the Passcode Lock page in Settings, you can see that you have an option to turn it on or off, require it immediately or after one, five or fifteen minutes or after one or four hours. It also allows you to access or not access Passbook and the ability to reply to a message when the phone is locked.

All those settings may be identical to the fingerprint scanning feature of the next iPhone….

I believe Apple intends to build both NFC and fingerprint readers into iMacs and iPads.

When you set your iPhone next to the keyboard of your iMac, all your online activity will identity you to various sites, which means that you’ll have an “E-Z Pass” right through password dialogs and credit card pages. You’ll just be able to log in as you and buy stuff without typing anything…

In the Real World, you’ll be able to authenticate purchases either via Bluetooth or NFC, skipping the line at the movie theater, department store and gas station. You’ll be billed, and be able to pay for your restaurant meal without the waiter’s involvement. (Letting a stranger take your credit card out of your sight is one of the weakest links in the way commerce works right now.)

As I wrote in Identity systems, failing to communicate,

What’s fucked up about identity is that every site and service has its own identity system. None are yours. All are theirs, all are silo’d, and all are different. For this we can thank the calf-cow model of client-server computing, and we are stuck in it. That’s why we are forced to remember how we identify ourselves, separately, as calves, to many different cows, each of which act like they’re the only damn cow in the world.

And I gotta say, Apple sucks at being an identity cow. I am three different calves to Apple right now. That is, three different AppleIDs. I have spoken to Apple people many times about their need to merge customer namespaces, and they give me the same answer every time: it’s too hard. Worse, they’ve screwed it up over and over. An Apple mail account that was once  foo at mac.com then became  foo at me.com is now also  foo at icloud.com.  On that basis alone Apple amply demonstrates the namespace problem, which might be the oldest problem (that’s still with us) in all of computing.

Einstein said, No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. The namespace problem was created — and worsened — by companies creating more namespaces. One more bigfoot creating one more way to leverage its own private namespace to the whole world is not a solution. It’s one more problem to solve.

The only way to solve the identity problem is where the most pain is felt: at the individual level.

This is a very hard fact for enterprise-level solution-makers to grok, because at their level the solution is always yet another namespace or yet another bigfoot company pushing yet another technical solution. That, in effect, is what Mike says Apple will do here. And they will fail, just like Facebook, Google, Microsoft (remember Hailstorm and Passport?) and every other bigfoot has failed. Because they can’t solve it.

Meanwhile, we’ve solved this kind of thing before at the personal level, over and over, and we will do it again.

If you want to help work on it, come to the Internet Identity Workshop next week in Mountain View. That’s where the real work is happening.

 

Outlining -> VRM

April 30, 2013 / / Comments Off on Outlining -> VRM

Dave Winer‘s SmallPicture is a vendor I’ve been relating to from the start, mostly by cheering on development, for example of Fargo, the online outliner I describe here. Now that SmallPicture has a reader, I can copy and paste the HTML from my Fargo outline into WordPress under its HTML tab. This makes piling up and publishing outlines of links quite easy. So here goes:

VRM

VRM in France (where I am now)

Marketing

Personal Clouds and the Internet of Things

I hope some SmallPicture developers will show up at IIW, so we can talk about possibilities there.

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