musing about the customer perspective

Over a decade ago, when I was working at an investment bank, one of the topics that kept coming up was “the multiprovider portal”. [Yes, it was that long ago, those forgotten times when investment banks still existed, when startups made no money, just “revenue”, and nobody cringed if you used the word “portal”].

The multiprovider portal was a simple concept. Let’s take an example.

At that time, it appeared that portals were built by financial services providers for financial services providers and nobody else. Customers went to the portal of the provider. Everything was very product and service and provider centric. Which was fine and dandy as long as nobody complained. But customers did complain. Customers wanted something better than that which they were being offered. If they held multiple accounts with one bank, they wanted to manage all those accounts from one place. More importantly, if they held accounts with a number of banks, they wanted to manage all those accounts from one place. As a result of this demand, people started offering account aggregation services.

At the time, we felt that companies would want something similar from their investment banks. Most large corporates had relationships with more than one investment bank. Usually at least two, sometimes more. So rather than force the customer to go to different portals for different services, we wanted to build something different. Allow the customer to use our portal to manage their relationships with investment banks other than us. Allow the customer to build a portal designed around the customer, as it were, rather than the service provider.

Imagine the scene: A customer of “our” bank using software provided by us in order to do business with other banks. Perish the thought. Well, the thought did perish. [So, too did investment banks. But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead.]

Roll the clock forward from 1998-99 to a few years ago. I remember those early discussions with Doc Searls as he convinced me through and through about the importance of Vendor Relationship Management. At least part of the drive behind VRM was this whole thing about doing things with the perspective of the customer. Amazon, do you realise that I buy books from people other than Amazon? For Amazon read eBay, Borders, Barnes and Noble, Abebooks, <insert name of preferred bookseller here>. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could aggregate all those purchases somewhere, so that my recommendations were based on my true purchases? Wouldn’t it be nice if I could choose which purchases I wanted to include and which ones I wanted to exclude, so that I didn’t get recommendations based on books I bought my 10-year old, or books I bought as presents for others? Wouldn’t it be nice if I had the ability to switch on “private shopping”?

Doc spent time explaining to me that people weren’t “getting” this inversion, this 180 degree shift away from Customer Relationship Management to Vendor Relationship Management. Where everything was viewed from  the customer’s perspective, not the provider’s.

I kept on wondering why people didn’t “get” it.

Now move the clock forward to today. When I move to the world of “social media”, hearing all the arguments about authority and power and traffic, I get slandered, libelled, I hear words I never heard in the Bible……just trying to keep my customers satisfied. Satisfied.

I must be wired differently. When I started using Facebook, and realised the value of the news feed when used properly, I used to keep my status updated regularly. Then, when Twitter came along, I did the expected thing and connected my tweets to Facebook status.

Until someone complained. Until I realised that some of my facebook friends weren’t interested in the high-frequency status change that twitter represented. So, hearing the complaints, I changed. I cut the connection between Twitter and Facebook. Now, if someone wanted to know about my status with twitter-like frequency, they came to twitter, not to Facebook.

More recently, a few days ago, I started playing in earnest with blip.fm. And I misread the small print while turning on the twitter service, thinking that only the tweets I preceded with a “!” would go to twitter. My bad. So when I started using blip, every blip I made resulted in a tweet being sent to twitter.

Until someone complained. And I realised what I’d done. And I fixed it.

2009 is going to be about big changes in this space. I guarantee it. Put whatever’s left of your house and your savings on it.

People will not come to “my” blog. They will go to “their” feed aggregator, where they can read all the people they’re interested in reading. If they see something of interest, they will dig deeper and come to my blog.

People will not come to read “my” tweets. They will go to “their” tweet aggregator, where they can read all the tweets of all the people they’re interested in following. If they see something of interest, they will follow the links provided.

People will not come to see “my” pictures in Flickr. People will not come to hear “my” music wherever.

“My” time is over.

It’s a different perspective.

Readers want everything and everyone they read aggregated; they select what to read, when to read it, how to read it. How to read it, where to read it, what device to use.

Similarly, listeners want everything they listen to and everyone they listen to aggregated for them; watchers want everything they see and everyone thet see aggregated for them.

We have had aggregation before. Past paradigm aggregation was about content owners and distribution and channels and audiences. Which allowed for words like authority and traffic. Which begat strange things like advertising.

Next paradigm aggregation is about the owner of the power to bestow attention, and to do something with that attention. The customer.

So the customer will not watch a television channel, but instead create her own, an aggregation at viewing guide level. The same with news and reviews, the same with music.

  • First, the ability to aggregate a directory of services selected by the customer rather than the provider.
  • Second, the ability to drill in, to dig deeper into these directories in order to do something with the particular service. Time shifted, place shifted. She will read your blog if she finds something of interest, when she wants to, how she wants to, using the device she chooses.
  • Third, the ability to participate, to feed back, to comment, to rate, all these services.
  • And finally, the ability to reuse all or part of the service so provided in a Creative-Commons-like way in order to produce something else, and to share that something else.

Just musing.

The Dark Side of The Moon

40 years since Apollo 8. Hard to believe it. I can still remember being entranced by the photographs from the mission, I can even remember how elated I was when my grandfather gave me a first day cover with the stamp of the photograph. Anders, Borman and Lovell were writ large into my brain long before the astronauts of Apollo 11.

You see, Apollo 8 was the first manned mission to see the dark side of the moon; in order to do that, it became the first to leave the earth’s gravity, the first to enter the moon’s gravity, all this done at a time when NASA was still learning about manned moon missions. As a boy of 11, I thought it was incredibly brave of the trio to pioneer those things, and found the whole mission enthralling.

Without them, there couldn’t have been an Apollo 11. Someone had to pave the way. See what it felt like to go through the Van Allen belts for the first time. See how good the telemetry was when contact was reacquired after going round the dark side of the moon.

Without the experience gained in Apollo 8, Lovell may have found the challenges of Apollo 13 a lot harder; instead, Jim Lovell, one of the most experienced astronauts ever, was on hand to help deal with one of the mst unusual crises ever. Incidentally, as a result, Jim holds the unusual record of having been to the moon twice without getting off and setting foot there.

History may look at Apollo 11 as the mission to note, or for that matter Gagarin. But for a young boy in Calcutta, the idea of someone leaving the earth’s gravitational field for the first time, of passing through the Here Be Dragons worlds of the Van Allen radiation belts for the first time, of being captured by another body’s gravitational attraction, of doing all that and coming back home safe and sound, every one of these ideas represented a pioneering scientific spirit that lit something within him.

And that is why this photograph still sends shivers down my spine.

A coda. Noticed a tweet from @jerrymichalski retweeting @mitchkapor indicating the existence of this video clip, which also includes photographs of a far more recent mission.

Musing about how people find things out

I love coffee. Haven’t had a cup since October 2006, but that doesn’t change the fact that I love coffee. Probably something to do with my South Indian roots, and being served fresh “decoction” coffee first thing in the morning for 16 of my 23 years in Calcutta. Wonderful stuff, I can still smell it. So when people tell me “wake up and smell the coffee”, I usually do. I can bring that aroma to mind at will.

[It took me a while to realise that my recidivist craving for nicotine was so deeply intertwined with that for caffeine; once I figured that out, and abstained from coffee and tea, the nicotine stayed given up. Cold turkey given up after a 31 year habit.]

So where was I? Yes, coffee. Here’s how it was made at home,  courtesy of Latha Narasimhan at the Yum Blog.

Nowadays I spend my time learning about different teas, training myself to distinguish my gunpowders from my silver needles. A part of me, nevertheless, keeps an eye on what’s happening in the world of coffee. Which brings me to the point of this post.

This little character. The luwak, a type of civet. Coffee beans that have been digested and egested by these creatures are treasured for their taste, treasured to the tune of $600 USD per pound. The most expensive coffee beans in the world.

That’s all right then. You get some coffee beans. Give them to your local friendly neighbourhood civet, wait for them to be digested and defecated. Then you collect the faeces, separate out the beans, make coffee with them. All’s well that ends well.

That wasn’t the part that got me. What got me was something far simpler. Questions like “How did they know? What made them try to make a drink out of the detritus in animal droppings? What else did they try? What are they going to convince us about next?”

Answers on a postcard. Preferably undigested.

Versions of Hallelujah: A definitive list in the making

So today history was made, as Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah went in at No 1 (Alexandra Burke) and No 2 (Jeff Buckley) in the Christmas charts in the UK, and with the original version at No 36. Some of us tried to make the Buckley version No 1, tried and failed, failed gloriously; remember it made No 2 on download sales alone, unlike Alex’s version.

It was worth it: from what I’ve gathered so far, it looks as if Leonard Cohen will earn over $2m in royalties from the week’s sales, with more to come. Given that he’s 74, given that he was allegedly cleaned out of his savings by his erstwhile business manager, that he sued her, Kelley Lynch, and won $9m in damages, that he has apparently not collected a red cent from her since; given all this, one could surmise he’s not rolling in it. So the money’s going to come in useful. [Yes, he’s under new management since!].

With the song so much in the news, I kept hearing that there were over a hundred versions of the song recorded; not as many as for Suzanne, but a substantial number anyway. Now I believe that the Buckley version is outstanding; Cohen is rumoured to have told Buckley’s mother that once he heard Buckley, he never needed to sing the song again. But that does not mean that other versions are awful, there are many different treatments, each to their own. I thought there must be a definitive list: but when I looked around, I could not find one.

So I thought I’d build one up and put it on Wikipedia, with as much detail as possible. Could you take a look at the list below and help me crowdsource this task? I promise to take all the inputs and load it up over the holidays, as a labour of love. If one of you would prefer to do it instead, be my guest, just let me know.

  1. Jeff Buckley
  2. Leonard Cohen
  3. John Cale
  4. KD Lang
  5. Gord Downie
  6. Daisy Chapman
  7. Espen Lind, Askil Holm, Alejandro Fuentes, Kurt Nilsen
  8. Rufus Wainwright
  9. Nora Foss al Jabri
  10. Regina Spector
  11. Bob Dylan
  12. Willie Nelson (Ryan Adams and the Cardinals)
  13. Alexandra Burke
  14. Imogen Heap
  15. Katherine Jenkins
  16. Anthony Michael Hall
  17. Kathryn Williams
  18. Allison Crowe
  19. Happy Mondays
  20. Diana Vickers
  21. Fall Out Boy
  22. Bono
  23. Blake
  24. Il Divo
  25. Barrel House Mamas
  26. Patricia O’Callaghan
  27. Bon Jovi
  28. Christina Marie
  29. Dresden Dolls
  30. Damien Rice
  31. Sheryl Crow
  32. The Junebugs
  33. Tony Lucca
  34. Elisa
  35. Chris Botti
  36. Clare Bowditch (Australian)
  37. Eric Beverly
  38. Erik Flaa
  39. Euan Morton and Denise Summers
  40. Arooj Aftab
  41. Gavin de Graw
  42. Jack Lukeman
  43. John Jerome
  44. Kate Noson
  45. K’s Choice
  46. Late Tuesday
  47. Lucky Jim
  48. Macbrolan
  49. Ari Hest
  50. Street to Nowhere
  51. Jennifer Terran
  52. Brandi Carlile
  53. Jay Clifford
  54. Gord Downie (Tragically Hip) duplicate
  55. Steffen Brandt and Tina Dickow (in Danish)
  56. Ulf Lundell (in Swedish)
  57. Enrique Morente (Spanish, flamenco style)
  58. Brigyn (in Welsh)
  59. Espen Lind, Askil Holm, Alejandro Fuentes, Kurt Nilsen duplicate
  60. Nosfell and Jane Birkin
  61. Susanna and the Magical Orchestra
  62. Kevin Max (DC Talk)
  63. Alex Lloyd (Australian)
  64. Eugenio Finardi (in Italian)
  65. Blue Jupiter
  66. Myles Kennedy
  67. Lincoln Brewster
  68. Alpha Rev (Casey McPherson, Austin)
  69. Sara Gazarek
  70. Jennifer Scott
  71. Peter Joback (in Swedish)
  72. Kermit
  73. Zach Wiedeman
  74. Birchwood Band
  75. Blumfeld (in German)
  76. Michael McDonald
  77. Glenn Hansard (The Frames/The Swell Season)
  78. Jason Castro
  79. Kate Voegele
  80. David Bazan
  81. Zach Condon (performs as Beirut)
  82. I Am The Lost Sea
  83. Karen Ann
  84. Noam Peled (Israeli)
  85. Naomi Hates Humans
  86. Christine Collister
  87. Amanda Jenssen
  88. Paramore
  89. Advent Children
  90. Krystal Meyers
  91. Lucy Lawless
  92. Alter Bridge duplicate, same as Myles Kennedy
  93. Martin Sexton
  94. Pain of Salvation
  95. Amanda Palmer
  96. Tim Minchin
  97. Phil Wickham
  98. Vocal Line
  99. Sharon Janis
  100. Robin Olson
  101. Popa Chubby
  102. Rea Garvey
  103. JLS
  104. Eoghan Quigg
  105. Lisa Hordijk
  106. Tangerine Dream
  107. Bobby Andonov

I stopped at 100, I am sure there are many more. I’ve taken care to make sure that all versions that predate 1984 and therefore couldn’t possibly be the same song are removed from the list, whether it’s from Handel’s Messiah or even from the Deep Purple one. Similarly I’ve excised all of the Lordi and other Hard Rock variations that are unrelated to the Cohen one. There is a rumour that Prince once recorded it, but I have not been able to find anything to back that up; there is evidence that he sang it but none of his recording it.

Incidentally, I spent some time going through a number of sites on the web to get this far. So if you want to listen to any of the versions, you’re best off visiting these sites first: here, where there’s a fine post on the subject, here, where there’s a good discussion,  and of course YouTube.

[My thanks to www.sweetandbitter.com for the silhouette image].

On the beach

I was at dinner yesterday with @gapingvoid, @stevecla, @jasonkorman, @dianamaria and @crossthebreeze. It was an enjoyable evening, topped off by late-night drinks at Harry’s Bar.

Over dinner, the conversation meandered across many subjects; at one stage we were talking about reboot, an inspiring conference that takes place annually in Copenhagen. I mentioned my interest in acquiring some of the chairs used during the breaks at reboot, which are available from strandstole.

Which reminded @crossthebreeze, Kris Hoet, to send me the links to a site he’d recommended to me when we last met in Berlin: Strandbeest. A creature of the beach.

Amazing stuff. A site well worth visiting, ideas that inspire, great execution. Go take a look.

My thanks to Kris.