Comments on: Customer emancipation

By: Of librarians, preachers and 911 operators…. | confused of calcutta

Of librarians, preachers and 911 operators…. | confused of calcutta — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 09:27:33 +0000

[...] Policy and the Future of the Internet; in it, fairly early on, he asserts the importance of the Three Is (Internet, Intellectual Property and Identity) more eloquently than I’ve been able to manage, which only goes to show. He says: I want to [...]

By: Jackie Danicki » This is the house that links built, y’all

Jackie Danicki » This is the house that links built, y’all — Tue, 08 May 2007 19:40:42 +0000

[...] Rangaswami on customer emancipation: “None of us owns the customer. If anything, the customer owns us. We seem to be taking a [...]

By: Folly Trumps Solipsism Trumps Arrogance « Hak Pak Sak

Folly Trumps Solipsism Trumps Arrogance « Hak Pak Sak — Tue, 08 May 2007 15:19:21 +0000

[...] Lewis on May 8th, 2007 A few days ago, on Confused of Calcutta, JP Rangaswami posted a piece about customer emancipation in which he described the irritation concepts such as owning content, owning customers, and owning [...]

By: JP

JP — Mon, 07 May 2007 19:04:12 +0000

Incognito, you may enjoy reading “The System of Professions” by Andrew Abbott, as also EO Wilson’s Consilience. See what you think.

By: Incognito

Incognito — Mon, 07 May 2007 16:33:19 +0000

I learnt a long time ago never to take my own propaganda too seriouslyâ€¦â€¦

Funny. I take it pretty seriously. :)

I enjoy what I do, I go to bed happy and wake up happy. Thatâ€™s important to me.

True.

“I believe that it is only a matter of time before enterprise software consists of only four types of application: publishing, search, fulfilment and conversation.”

JP, when I read comments like these, and I think about the Internet, the chaos of information age; It basically forces me to think on a deeper, intricate level. I think, this age is not just about convergence of information, it’s about the convergence of knowledge at a more deeper, talismanic level.

If you see all evolutionary knowledge and experience of every human being can now be inter-connected. Above all, I also believe that knowledge is also passed on as a kind-of gene (people have proved this too). Information adds more currentness to it, kind of like proof of certain theorems. Internet is definitely the way of cumulative self-realization (or at least the start of it).

Try reading this, kind-of chaotic, still it might explain my confusion

Why there is so much isolation of information and knowledge?
Even in the age of Internet, the age of talismanic interconnectivity, there remains the absence of philosophical and cognitive Internet.

Why is that, when it comes to enlightenment/satisfaction, there are separate ways of doing it like meditation, theoretical physics, writing, blogging (Iâ€™ll come back to this point later on) and so on?

Why donâ€™t we realize that we need a Unified Theory?

Hey wait! Doesnâ€™t this sound familiar?

Let me take one more metaphysical example. The more modern deduction of the Omega Point Theory is that Internet will be our way of realizing the â€œloving, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent Godâ€. Itâ€™s not the Internet which we see today, about which Frank Tipler is talking about. Itâ€™s the other Internet, the cognitive Internet. But does he know that? I doubt so. And that is exactly where the irony lies.

Why is that nowadays, terms like â€œworld changingâ€ and â€œrevolutionaryâ€ are not associated with inventions at a more frequent pace then in the past? Why is that, the art of invention and discovery has been castrated into small, more miniscule and recursive entities of human endeavors like science, religion, technology and art?

In the olden, pre-historic days of more pure human endeavors, things were simple. There was no science, no technology, no religion, no nothing. So they invented the wheel, discovered fire. No negative reverberations, no criticism, no challenges of the proving its importance.

Fast foreword a few hundred thousand years, we see total chaos. People from each domain are so into themselves, are so achievement hungry, face so much competition that they develop an inherent hate for other domains. They love their domain specialization. They want to and are proudly defining â€œthe divinityâ€ in their own language, can be mathematics, C++, Vedas, music or art.

By: Stephen Smoliar

Stephen Smoliar — Mon, 07 May 2007 15:39:55 +0000

Dave the Lifekludger seems to be the only one who “gets it” (to use JP’s language). Whether or not he has read any George Herbert Mead, he is a great student of this pioneer of social theory! Mead’s basic story is that the social world we inhabit is a world of symbols and most (if not all) of how we behave in that world comes down to how we interpret those symbols. Now in an objective world (like the world of mathematics) every symbol has a “context-free” interpretation; but, in the social world, as the cliche goes, context is everything. This means that, more often than not, we cannot interpret symbols without exchanging OTHER symbols with OTHER inhabitants of the social world. That is called “conversation;” and Mead’s fundamental thesis (often called the thesis of “symbolic interactionism”) is that we cannot understand the world without it.

“Content” is nothing more than a noun that names the class of all those symbols we are trying to interpret. With that usage it need not grate on either our ears or our consciousness. Is it “king?” Well, in a default sense I suppose it is: In other words it is the only thing we have through which we come to understand the world. Can it be owned? Hell, no! No more than the air we breathe can be owned, because, if air is what sustains our physical existence, the class of all symbols is what sustains our social existence. (Of course, given what we are doing to the environment, ownership of air may seem less absurd within my own lifetime; but that is another story!)

By: JP Rangaswami

JP Rangaswami — Mon, 07 May 2007 10:08:08 +0000

Incognito, I learnt a long time ago never to take my own propaganda too seriously……I enjoy what I do, I go to bed happy and wake up happy. That’s important to me.

By: Incognito

Incognito — Mon, 07 May 2007 08:53:13 +0000

JP,

This thing has been bugging me from the last many days, and everytime I read your blog.

Why are you no the CIO of something seminal as Google?

You should be, for all of us.

By: Anant

Anant — Mon, 07 May 2007 06:55:10 +0000

There is only one situation when content is king: when there is only one content producer.
There is only one situation where the pipe-owner is king: when there is only one pipe.

In any other situation, the customer chooses the content source and the pipe that he prefers…

…and the customer is the king.

By: MNB

MNB — Mon, 07 May 2007 06:21:26 +0000

“Owning the customer” is symptomatic of organisations, units or individuals jealously guarding their important relationships. It is based on guarding preceived power and influence to maximise profit in the value network. Trouble is, relationships are complex and adapt rapidly threatening the status quo and causes defensive reactions. Content is a component perceived to deliver a large degree of power in relationships; hence the general comment we frequently hear. I prefer to see things more simply: give customers (wherever they are in the value network) what they want at the price they want; make that price more that it costs you to deliver and everyone’s a winner.