JP Rangaswami guest blogging at the The Daily Telegraph has a beautiful piece today on "The Economics of the Customer". It makes you want to go out and hug a technologist.
As technologists, we have two choices:
One is to provide the customer a better experience, the freedom to select what he wants, a differentiation based on service quality against a backdrop of abundance.The second is to create artificial scarcities around the things that are abundant, create new inconveniences for the customer, new lock-ins, new irritants. Irritants like Region Coding on DVDs. Lock-ins like we see in digital music.
For the last thirty years, too many of us in IT have focussed on creating these artificial scarcities, often without even knowing it. First we paid to bury the data in vendor stacks, then we paid to try and dig it out. We've been doing this for years. And we're in danger of doing it again.
Time for a change. [YES!]
Time to focus on ways of delivering service where the customer wants, when the customer wants, how the customer wants. Time to focus on open platforms, open protocols, open software, open ways of doing business.
That's what the economics of abundance is really about. Making money because of what you do, and not with what you do. Having customers who stay with you because they want to, not because they have to.
Doc and Hugh pulled the above quote, bolding the phrases "what" and "with" - emphasizing the powerful shift and opportunity we have today in the alignment of abundance and economics. I wanted to also point out the "want" and "have" aspects of customer choice.
I've written often on the importance of focusing on the "customer" and refer to this as the "Revenge of the Whos" (yes, those cute little guys who were buddies with Horton). You may recall that the Whos asked Horton to protect them and that Horton not only protected them but also encouraged them to protect themselves by banding together - so all the little Whos in Who-ville banded together and shouted in unison "we are here, we are here".
Well, the Whos are realizing their power and the Technologists can play a role as Horton. It has take longer than this impatient gal would have liked, but the power of the individual and the customer to impart change and choice is now stronger than ever. Customer's have a choice and the power to exercise it via their voices and their wallets. It is in everyone's interest to provide customers with abundance of experience, service and quality. You won't be sorry.
[Note - I just learned that 20th Century Fox is making an animated version of my favorite Dr. Seuss book. Yippee. Too bad, I have to wait till 2008 to see it.]
Doc/Hugh - Thanks for the pointer.
