Free customers are far more capable of providing intelligence to companies than captive ones are. CRM systems, as we have them now, are good for captive customers and limiting very much what you can learn from customers. It involves a great deal of guess work. It involves a great deal of limitation to what a customer can tell you about what they want because it's limited to the few things you are willing to let them tell you.

Customers are going to be coming at companies; 'free range' customers are going to be coming at companies, telling them things that the old dairy-system cattle chutes never allowed customers to say before. That's going to be good for companies; it's going to be good for CRM systems, because the VRM systems, the vendor-relationship management systems that customers have, are going to bring far more intelligence into the marketplace, and that's going to improve marketplaces, as well.

Vendor Relationship Management Systems (VRM) Will Govern Corporate Data Gathering
What's going to happen, and this is what I'm working on of course, with something called VRM, which is vendor relationship management, it's the reciprocal of customer relationship management. It's where the customer controls their information. We become, as a customer, the integration point for our own data, our transaction histories, our credit histories, our preferences, and then the origination point for the way those are used.

For example, it would be really great if we had our own terms of service. When you walk into a store, you have great terms of service. You look like a good customer; you're wearing a blazer. It doesn't matter if you're wearing jeans; you might actually buy something. They don't want your identity. They don't want you to become a member, or anything else like that, in order to spend your money and be a loyal customer.

In fact, you're more likely to be a loyal customer if they don't interrogate you and make things difficult for you. The way CRM systems tend to work, especially online; they want to scrape up as much data about you so they can spam you later with guesswork about what you might want. It's almost always annoying, and give you surveys which are almost always a bad guess at what you want.

Authority is Anyone Who has a Good Idea
It used to be there were very few sources of authority. Authority was the church; authority was the state; authority was large companies; authority was degreed individuals at educational institutions. Now, authority is much more widespread. Anybody who has a good idea that's worth spreading has authority.

What's going on now is we're all tweeting at each other. We're blogging at each other. We're contributing ideas to companies. We're contributing ideas to the church, to the government, to the rest of it. I mean, the Obama Campaign was very bottom-up as well at top-down. That guy won because lots of people gave that particular campaign some very good ideas. There was authority in that campaign that was granted to individuals that could contribute to it.

That changes as well; we're going to have post-institutional ideas and realizations about what authority is and how it's formed, where it comes from, what gets built with it, how trust grows out of it; all of those things are not so much up for grabs, but they are going to be spread much more thinly than they were before, and are going to be very disruptive, frankly, in the short term. In the long term, new institutions will come out of it.

Advertising Must Give Way to Global Customer Preferences
Advertising is fundamentally flawed. It's flawed because it's guesswork. It's flawed because it's monologue. It's flawed because the systems in place are predicated on a whole bunch of assumptions that elevate guesswork to an art.

In the meantime, the customers are out there with actual demand, money on the table, ready to buy, for something. I would like to be able to give people an ability to say, like to Apple, I'm going to buy the next laptop when it has a 500 GB drive in it, and you put a Firewire drive back on it so I can use some of my older gear with it. If you're not coming through with that, I'm not buying your damn machine. 'I'm just letting you know; you may never pay attention to that, but that's information from me. If you think that's worth something; it's good. I want to be able to make global preferences.'

The Periodic Table of Possibilities for the Internet is Endless
The difference between the virtual world that is the Internet, and the physical world that we inherited, is that the periodic table we are going to create of elements that we build, solutions, or the future, or whatever else out of, is endless. For example, there are at least half a million, maybe over a million open source codebases right now. Most of them produced at no cost or very little cost or very few of them owned by companies. They have this characteristic which is unique to the online, the Internet universe.

One is what we call NEA. It stands for 'nobody owns it, everybody can use it, and anybody can improve it.' The first two actually apply to things like nobody owns gravity, everybody can use gravity but nobody can improve gravity. On the Internet, however, you can improve on everything that the Internet runs on. That makes it very hard to say the Internet is a finished thing; it's not. What we do on it is we're only beginning to discover.

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