It's customer-centric and it's coming...

I don't ordinarily post stuff from other blogs verbatim (do I?), but this just had to be elevated to more prominence than it had buried in Doc Searl's recent post

In other ways, however, the differences between customers and consumers remain an academic distinction. For example, airlines and car rental agencies conspire to create an on-line experience that replicates the airport experience in which travelers have been trapped for decades. Ideally, you would like to present your credentials and preferences to a whole market category and have vendors compete for your business. Instead, you're forced to flit from agency to agency like a bee buzzing between flowers, looking for the best car and the best deal.

Recently I talked to the top marketing guy at one of the car rental agencies. When I told him my ambitions for "fully empowered customers" that could engage several agencies at the same time, and that this would be good for his business, he was horrified by the idea. To him, customers were consumers, period. "We're in a tonnage business", he said. He made it clear that his company didn't want to get any more personal than it needed to.

So I think there is undone work here. First, we need to understand what networked--conversational--markets really are. I think they are so different from anything we saw in the vendor-dominated industrial age that we have to all but zero-base our new understanding of them. I also think there must be some original and creative work being done by economists on the subject. In fact, I'm told there is. But I haven't found it yet. So that's a project for this next year.

I hope I've already said this clearly enough in several posts on this blog, but it does seem that there is a mind-shift forming in the blogosphere.

Let's see what happens in 2006...

Oh, and any Ruby gurus who want to spend 6 months in Thailand for very little money, please get in touch! ;)