Doc Searls At VRM08
In this session at the VRM08/Berkman conference, Doc Searls presents and discusses the concept of Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) as a counterpart to Customer Relationship Management (CRM). He argues that free, empowered customers are more valuable than captive ones and that markets will only become truly free when customers are free. Searls frames VRM as an application of the Internet’s end‑to‑end principle to market relationships, emphasizing personal, edge‑centric tools that let individuals manage their own data, preferences, and vendor interactions. He introduces the “REL button” and personal data stores as concrete mechanisms for expressing intent to buy, sell, or maintain a relationship on one’s own terms. The talk explores early‑adopter (beachhead) domains such as non‑commercial broadcasting, podcasts, and healthcare, and cites examples like Apple’s Genius Bar, Intel’s handheld devices, and open‑source community practices. Throughout the discussion, participants raise practical challenges—technical, political, and organizational—including power asymmetries, the need for interoperable tools, accountability between vendors and customers, and the tension between granular negotiation and subscription‑style simplicity. Searls calls for building a toolbox of VRM technologies, gathering data on cost‑benefit trade‑offs, and engaging both vendors and users to shift the market dynamics toward reciprocal, consent‑based relationships.
Chapters
This is going to be a brief review. Are we running, Sean, so people see us on the—
Sean?
5 people out there? You might need to wave at them. Hi.
Hello. Hello.
Somebody tap you. Can't hear you. Hi. You're on stage. I just want to make sure that we're on.
Yeah, we're on.
It's a little green light. I'm used to seeing a little red light, so I'm never sure whether it's a— And he's got it too.
The red line's out.
So we have the red line's out and the red light is out on Sean's machine. It's back to normal. Some people are actually listening or watching in. Is Phil coming, by the way? He's not here yet. He's not here yet, okay. Okay, that's cool. So the Plutonian Manifesto is, probably most of you know, had 95 theses, in part because they were remarkable. Packed it up to 95, so probably about 8 in reality. I'm going to call this a Vera MiniFesto because it's got very few theses to it. So the first is that a free customer is more valuable than a captive one. So this is— I'm leveraging the art of Kim McLeod, who with permission, not that I asked, but he gave it to me later, And here's a captive customer, and that's how we represented those. And that's— the problem is that too many of us still think the opposite way, which is that the best customer is a captive one. So this is sort of the market model that we've had through the entire industrial age. That's why we as sellers manage and control and otherwise own these creatures that we call customers. That's— when we're on the sell side, that's how we tend to talk, and that's how we tend And I think this is a lot of what Deb meant when she was talking yesterday. You know, so that's why we think the free market is your choice of captor. Here's a customer here. This is the Wall Street Journal view, for example. You know, this is— it said— have anybody played street basketball? You know, there's a— the rules of street basketball are make it, take it. You make a shot, you get to keep the ball, right? That's sort of the market rules as your hardcore reporter that Republican capitalists see it. It's like, winner take all, biggest guys win, you know, so their argument against net neutrality, net neutrality won't let the market do market work, not recognizing, for example, that all the carriers are, you know, are creatures in a regulatory zoo, you know, would never actually survive without the protection of the government that they more or less buy. That's a whole other story, but that's it. There's Verizon and there's Quest and there's the others. That's basically the model that you've had for a long time. You know, which brings us to thesis number 2: markets won't be free until customers are free. We talk about free markets, but we need to have free markets based on free customers, and that's the idea. And the old mentality becomes obsolete. So, and it becomes obsolete because free customers prove to be more valuable than capital. We don't have that absolute proof yet, at least not to the satisfaction of the Wall Street Journal. I think that we will succeed when that kind of thing happens. We will succeed when we've actually proven it, and our job here is to prove it. So what we need, of course, is BRM, and that's vendor relationship management. So as we all know, as my little symbol today for BRM, it's the Nets End-to-End principle applied to markets. Is Roger around here?
She's on her way in.
She's on her way in? How far away is she?
Quite a way.
Quite a way.
Shit.
OK, well, so anyway, it's the net's end-to-end principle applied to markets. And for companies, VRM is reciprocal to CRM. So you've got VRM here, and the company has its CRM systems over there. And the two work together somehow. For individuals, it's just a way to relate. You don't necessarily have to have a CRM system on the other side. And I wanted— I want to make sure that we see VRM in terms not just of how we relate to CRM. We call it reciprocal CRM, and I think for companies it is, but for individuals, you know, it's not necessarily. It also applies in its end-to-end nature. This is— the net was designed with an architecture, and the architecture is very simple. The architecture is any— endpoint can communicate with any other endpoint by the most convenient means possible. It doesn't require intermediation. In fact, it doesn't want intermediation. It wants the net to be stupid. That's David Eisenberg's term. He's another, uh, now a veteran, um, uh, Berkman Fellow. He, when he was working at AT&T many years ago, he created an essay called The Rise of the Stupid Network. Which is— AT&T at the time was trying to make— trying to kind of absorb the net inside of its intelligent systems. And his point to AT&T was, no, you have to make it as stupid as possible in the middle and as capable as possible supporting customers at the edges, and the value will come from there. So I think VRM actually applies in its end-to-end nature. So for example, and this is actually 3 or 4 slides that I give when I talk to companies companies, so— and I get invited to speak to them. So I looked at some of the— I wanted to review them. One is, if I'm calling for tech support, but I should be able to express lower logical preferences outside any way of silo. So if I'm calling for tech support, then I don't want to hear a commercial message and I'm willing to pay X to reach a human in under 60 seconds. For healthcare, I should be able to manage my own healthcare data instead of risking my life when I fill out manual forms of names of diseases that I don't know how to spell, and I have now several of those. I should be able to issue a personal RFP to whole markets on the fly. This is on Sunday in Amsterdam. I arrived in Amsterdam, it's a city I'd never been in before. Of course you always need these things on a Sunday, right? You know, I needed an AC adapter, a power mains adapter to go from 220 to 110. But it had to be at least 200 watts. So, you know, without going into a silo or giving any more than the required information, which mainly consists of being trustworthy and having money to spend. I should be able to manage my relationships with vendors by my own devices. So this is one— this here is a handheld device that Intel was showing off at CES in January. The significant thing about— and there's a whole bunch of stuff I've skipped here because I'm trying to make this short, but at the CES show in January, this is the largest consumer electronics show in the world, Intel had a booth that was just enormous. It was like an acre or 2 acres or something like that. And their whole mobility section had nothing but basically what formerly were Windows devices running Linux. And it wasn't running any Linux, it was running Chinese Linux called Red Flag. And Red Flag actually knocked off Apple's Apple's iconography, the whole design that they have, that sort of chiclet-looking square design for the iPhone, and they actually improved on Cover Flow. So with COVID Flow, you go left and right and go through files, right? But if you want to go up and down, you have to kind of go up through folders. They just made it like a barrel that rolled. It was really cool. And they totally knocked it off and improved on it. That's how open source should and does work. So the Intel's whole point is that they want to see full markets grow on top of mobile devices. And I think for most of the rest of the world, mobile devices are far more capable and far more personal than the laptops that we tend to use here. So this also means agreements that need to go both ways. So my terms of service should eliminate terms of service with corporate lawyers that nobody reads and everybody has to accept. You know, on the net, we take for granted that it's okay to say accept. And go through this little ritual. But we don't do that in real life. We shouldn't have to do that in digital life either. So it means real relationships between truly consenting parties, just like we have in the physical world. So one project is a new business model for free media that isn't advertising. There's an assumption that's gone on through the whole Web 2.0 phase, and I have a web tool, by the way, called "The Name Will Give the Next Crash." So I don't know if it will turn out that way or not. It's always about advertising. Advertising is going to support everything. Well, it doesn't have to support everything. That's just a lazy assumption. Let's do better than that. Let's have real business going on here. The next bubble? Am I quoted?
I don't want to say that.
The future of web tools— that's so great. That's so great. Technology Review. Is MIT? Yeah. So this is one of the handheld devices. It's a Lenovo thing. And that's cover flow going up and down, as well as right and left, and navigating through directory levels. So free media include starting with non-commercial broadcasting. It also includes blogs and podcasts. It includes music, or anything that's free on purpose, or too easy to steal, to use the terms of the record industry. Industry, but you don't have to necessarily steal if you have a relationship. And the toolbox for that project is the REL button, which was gone over before. And I want to thank Britt and his colleague Scott for sort of taking my very crude design for the REL button and giving it some shading. And it's still a placeholder of a sort, and we need to do trademark searches and stuff like that, but basically What it does, it represents two sort of magnets facing each other. And it says I'm going to pay what I want and/or I want to relate on my terms and not just yours. And this is my code's way of telling your code that even if you're not listening yet, meaning it's not like a fear of, I mean, CRM, it also means, it doesn't mean look, I'm automatically trying to get only what I want. It's just that I want to put a coalition in here in our relationship, maybe we can discover a price. Especially with free media, the price is zero. It falls to zero. So we can add anything to zero, and that can be what we're willing to pay. So Khalia, who told me 2 years ago that she wants to pay This American Life directly and doesn't want to go through WBDC or WQED, she wants to go straight to Ira Glass and friends, she can say, I want to pay $0.45 every single time I listen to one or I listen to one on a podcast or something. Those are her terms. They're probably willing to accept those terms, especially once they the sum gets large enough so a transaction can take place. We can set this up any way we want, but that's basically it. There's my side, there's your side, we're two equal parties. It kind of looks like an equal sign too, I hadn't thought of that, but it's, you know, it can work that way. So it's a symbol, VRM, ECRM. And it can represent three different states. We've had four different states, three different states, five different states. Chris gave a talk where it was four, and you had quadrants too, I think, and that I wanted to find that this morning before I could unpack it, but this is close enough. One is an intention to buy and/or to relate. And second is an intention to sell but also relate on your terms, that's the buyer's terms as well as your own. And the third is an existing relationship, meaning I can assert this or a seller can assert this one, or either one of us can visit a site or open a podcast or whatever else and we discover this and say, oh, I forgot I actually I actually do give money, or I do like Elvis Mitchell's The Treatment on KCRW, and I like to give them a little bit of money every once in a while. And I'm a member of that. From the station side or the podcaster side, their membership is a big deal. It's been a big deal for a long time. But it doesn't have to be the only deal. We can add more to what a station does than just the old membership thing, which is just you take a pledge, right? There's no limited data types that can be stored on either side or both sides. So they can include intentions, transaction records, preferences, memberships, social graphs, shopping lists, existing agreements or whatever. So, you know, Kevin's social stuff and Google stuff can all fit in here. It doesn't mean that, you know, that there has to be a limit on it because of some vendor vendors' architecture. And in fact, I think what you're trying to do with OpenSocial is not— is actually liberate the vendor side as well as the customer side.
Is that right?
Right. It's trying to make sure that things are interoperable so that you can socially— yeah, that's a key part of it.
Right. So I mean, I don't understand it. I neglected to attend your thing yesterday. I get the intention, and I think that's moving in the right direction. So here's what we would like to see at first. And thanks again to Brit and friends for creating this. This is a type— now type 1 iPhone. And with— how many people here actually listen to radio through iTunes? Oh, yeah, I think 3 or 4 of you. OK. Until Pandora came on the iPhone last week, now you can actually stream it. Yeah, I know AOL Radio too. And some other things. But it's great. And I'm glad that actual applications happen there. The interesting thing about iTunes is if you go to— there's a little thing called Radio in it. And there's a list of like 1,000 stations in there in a little directory. It should be trivial to just download that. Every time you sync, you just take your stations. You just favorite some of them and you have a subset of them. And you've got a directory of them. So this person say, listen to KCRW KQED.
WNYC.
And the little radio button there looks almost exactly like the one in iTunes. And there's a symbol here. And the symbol is, you know, is a little bell button. And the bell button says, well, look, KQED is actually interested in relating to you on your terms as well as theirs, whatever it happens to be. Now, they're not equipped to do much more than take a pledge right now, but we can understand that. At least the willingness is there. So it'll work on a radio podcast, as a radio podcast tuner for the iPhone or other mobile devices, and there's one that I showed before, and there's the other one. It'll provide a new business model for media. So now they don't have to just turn programming off in 2 weeks, pledge poverty, and give you a CD if you send in some money and call that a relationship and a membership. You go beyond that. And we can start with non-commercial sources and then grow to include everything, starting with the music business. I actually think that VRM has the potential to utterly and completely reform and deliver on what the music business has wanted for a long time, starting with the artists that are willing to give their stuff away for free online. Right now, if you want to go to Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails or somebody else who's actually giving away free music, Brad Sucks is a guy who actually came here, sat in this room, and gave us a talk a few weeks ago. And he's been at it since like 1997 or something like that. He's a hacker. And performer makes a living, makes a living giving away music and then having people pay what they want for it. But they all have different— they all have their own little CRM system. You have to go to their website and just like with a public radio station, go through 3 or 4 minutes of stuff trying to get on there. So if there's a common way of doing that, we can provide it. That's with the customer being the point of integration. So Vera makes customers and platforms. It gives customers an API or a set of APIs or whatever it takes. Anybody can program goods or services and base businesses on what customers actually want and are in control of. And so here are some specifics to guide both developers and marketers. And these are from the 10 principles that I put up on the blog a few days ago. And they reduced substantially in number. Thanks to Joe for the suggestion I could reduce them. So the first is that VRM's personal. OK, so that doesn't mean it isn't social, just that it's personal first. It starts with the individual. VRM tools are personal tools, just like the wallet is a personal tool. Companies don't have wallets, people have wallets. Just like the bank account is a personal tool, but not like a credit card. I think there's a difference because bank accounts are self-issued. I kind of make my own bank account in a way that credit cards are not. Credit cards are given to me. There's a different model there. There's a subtle difference. I'm not sure entirely what it is, but I think we need to unpack it because we tend to think, well, it's my credit card, it's a personal thing. But, you know, it's happened to me last week, you know, Chase decided to kill off the credit card I used to do automatic payments about 20 things that I now need to debug in the world. It's their credit card, it's not my credit card. They can take They can kill it off if they feel like doing that. You know, it's a different thing with a bank account. So an ARCard or a MIND or a personal data store need to be personal tools or tool sets first. VRM tools provide individuals with ways to manage relationships. So, you know, and that can be with vendors, with organizations, with government entities, and with each other. And again, whether those relationships are enduring or transitory, it may be that, you know, I want to buy something from some company one time. It may be that I'm just showing up and I have a policy that I want a double decaf cappuccino any place that I show up. And I've got something in my pocket that's a fob or an RFID that says somebody has walked in the store that wants a double decaf cappuccino, we've got one, right? Or it can have one rating form, or it gets tied in with the GPS on my phone, you know, and I see anybody who's willing to sell me a double decaf cappuccino as I'm going through the world. That's how— that's at a low-level automated way, this can be, you know, VRM can be a way that we deal with the world sort of automatically. So with VRM, individuals are the central points of integration. You know, even if the data is stored in the cloud, even if the individual is trusted thanks to a third party, and I think especially the third parties involved, I think that there's an enormous opportunity for third parties who grant trust or manage trust or work with the large portfolio of identity technologies and other kinds of technologies to bring this together in the existing corporate world that we have. I think there's a lot of opportunity for that. But I also don't want to lose track of the fact that it's also personal. So, which it will be in many but not all cases. I don't think there's any limits to data types or quantities that individuals can hold or to what they can assert. And so I don't want us to say, well, you know, VRM can only be, you know, certain kinds of data. I think that the data store that Ian's working on and that mind and other things.
What's that?
Eleanor Barrett.
Capital H. Capital— what's that? I.
Is it a choice?
Okay. There are no limits to, you know, the type or amount of business that can be built on BRM because of absolutely built on free customers working in free markets. I think that there's not a chicken and egg thing here. There is a cause and effect. We have to equip the customers first. It has to be starting with the individual. And then we have free customers working in free markets. The same goes for governments and citizens. The same goes for organizations and members. So it doesn't just apply in business. It applies with nonprofits. It applies with all kinds of churches. It applies to any kind of organization. So I think we're sitting here at ground zero for Markets 3.0. I was thinking this morning that this is ground zero for so many things. So Barack Obama's ass sat in one of your seats, or probably several of them, right? A lot of really cool, important people have sat in this room. Harvard Law School is the be-all and end-all, but this is a significant place. I think there's one reason the Berkman Center does what it does. We like to start stuff. A thing about the Berkman Center that I don't know if Phil explained it yesterday or not, but it's an interesting thing that we're essentially a research organization and we are not a partisan organization. We are, by our charter, we're not allowed to take sides with something, but we do look for effects. We do look for effects. We do care about the net and we care about society. We're here to study the internet and society and how those come together. So we do look for effects and that's what we're doing with this. So I think this is from straight from Alvin Toffler. I have a bunch of slides about him but I'm not going to include them here. He said, he talked about the three ages and in his book The Third Wave which is which he wrote in 1979, came out in 1980. He said, you know, the first was the agrarian age, was followed by the industrial age, and then an information age would follow. I think we're there now, but we're not quite into it. One kind of phase, when the next one comes along, and we don't lose industry. Industry does not go away. There's a lot we can learn from industry. But I think it's not just information as another form of word for data, which is how we tend to use it. But how we inform, inform each other. Tim O'Reilly and I had a conversation several years ago where both of us were expressing our misgivings about the word information used as a commodity, that it was something more than that. It wasn't just data. And if we look at where the derivation of the word information is the— is derived from the verb to inform, which is in turn derived from the verb to form, which is, you know, if Tom tells me something I didn't know before, I'm changed by that. If I'm listening to him, I'm changed by that. I'm now using it in some way. You know, there's a, you know, I mean, I was changed by Kalia telling me 2 years ago that she simply wanted to, you know, pay this American life directly. She said tap. I didn't know what she meant by tap. Now I know. OK, she changed me. I was increased in some way by what she said. So what we call authority is what we grant, the right we grant other people to form us. We are all authors. This is the line that came out of that conversation. We are all authors of each other. So we can also be authors of business. We can also be authors of civilization. But we individually have to be empowered. And that's what we're here to do. So let's rock. That's it. Build stuff. I think we need to build stuff. End of thing. Any questions before we get too late into what we're going to do today? We're not in a rush. We're not in a rush? We're not in a rush. We just have a rush. We're in Santa Barbara mode. In Santa Barbara mode. Too much school, let's go outside. Let's build a sandcastle. Jeffrey's ready to play. I saw— I was just wondering where you guys were going. Oh, you want to— no, that's cool. My assistant over here. OK. You're in your room. Just go.
I wish to—
I'll go second and defer to Charles. OK. Charles. I get something out of your talk every time I hear it.
Something different. Today, I was thinking about the fact that when you talk about relationships that we have in the real world as opposed to the digital world, The difference there is dialogue as opposed to a one-way conversation or a robotic fill in this form or answer these questions, right? And that's part of the—
The form always sucks.
Right.
It's just, they're always bad guesses.
Right.
Yeah.
So ideally, I'd love to have a person at the other end, right, to have a conversation with, an informed person who can negotiate with me as I would if I had a B2B relationship. Relationship as opposed to, say, a B to C one. So I think the challenge for us is how do we do that in a heuristic way.
In a heuristic way?
Yeah.
Yeah. Because a heuristic way—
the cost will drop to a point where companies will accept it. But the tricky part is the software.
And you know what, we need— this is one of the things. So here's one way I can use help, okay. So I have a kind of assignment from one of the other fellows. I worked this out with him. His name is Kareem Lakhani. He teaches at the business school. He used to be at Sloan at MIT. And what do we want to study?
Okay.
You know, I'd like to look, for example, for precedence in history of— or in business, or things I don't know about where you really do have equivalence in power between customers and vendors. One would be what— How do we do the math on, you know, where we look at on the one hand the cost savings that companies have rationalized by removing the cost, you know, by having no contact if possible with customers. That's what the voicemail, I mean the phone center maze is about. We're going to deflect customers as much as possible. And if we're going to interact with them, we're going to throw them into a marketing Tom Guarriello, you know, we'll have the regular customer, we'll let them call in, we'll automate the way that they ask for tech support, while they're waiting we're going to give them an ad for something. You know, that's one system that we have now that's well understood. A lot of numbers in that. What's the other one? How do we get the numbers for the other one? You know, what is that? And that's more or less what you're saying, where you have conversation, where you have relationship and not just transaction.
Where getsatisfaction comes in, where the crowd is going to take over.
Say it again.
You know the site getsatisfaction?
Oh, yes, right.
Where the customers and the people just take over the customer support for an organization which has such a maze.
Right, right. They say, I'm sick and tired of it, we'll do it ourselves. Right, yeah.
Worked for Microsoft.
I'm sure there actually are some— there's probably some tracks in the snow on that thing. I think there probably are some companies that have gone the other way and are trying to pioneer having actual relations. I know actually in Apple's case, Apple actually went through a very big change. And actually I'm told that Steve Jobs himself went through a change on that, that they decided if they were going to do great customer service, they actually had to have more personal contact. And that because they're actually charging people an extra $300, $400, for customer support that they should get to human beings as fast as possible. Now, this wasn't just any human being, these people were paying a lot of money in the first place, but that's what Apple does. But that's why they have the Genius Bar, that's one of the ways they rationalize the stores. So there's probably some— something there we can work on. Chris.
Can you comment on beachheads and early adopters? I look at this and I'm sold on it. When I push this with companies, I get, wow, that's really interesting.
Let's have dinner.
Let's have dinner. I'd like to read your paper. And yet I look at this and I think, you know, if this were— and it's not just semantics, but semantics is part of it. If this is packaged right, this could dramatically reduce marketing costs. There would be a lot of self-selection.
Close it up.
Yeah. And I guess I'd just like to hear you and also hear the group on that, getting customers customers to like the idea of controlling data, even imperfectly controlling it, just controlling it better, I think such an attractive deal that people will start nodding for it. Getting companies to really engage with it is, I think, initially gonna be an uphill battle.
It's gonna be totally an uphill battle until we have the goods. I like when you say it's interesting. There's a funny book called How to Speak Minnesotan by Howard Moore a few years ago. And one of his things was, in Minnesota, that's interesting means that's bad. And you bet, or you betcha, means that's good. It's sort of like if you say, that's a good question, that means you don't have the answer. It's like, if that's interesting, it means it sucks. This is one of those cases where we need the inventions that mother necessity, right? We have to have the means to the ends. We don't have them yet. Saying to companies, look, it's going to be really great to engage with your customers. One of the things that came out of the experience we've had since Cluetrain came out 8 to 9 years ago now, between 8 and 9 years ago depending whether you're talking about the book or the website, is that we've actually given rise to the deification of conversation in marketing. Without the actual practice of having something. So, you know, it's sort of like Mark Twain talking about how Congress fights war by talking about it, you know, rather than actually doing something. So we're, you know, we have to have the goods there. We actually have to have something there. That's why we want to work on the rail button with something where the threshold, with the beachhead, to use your first term, you know, I happen to think that that public broadcasting and podcasting and that is a good, one of the best beachheads we can have. I think that healthcare is, probably has a lot of little beachheads in it that we can push against, but it's not there yet. There are probably some at a vendor-to-vendor relationship level within enterprises and between companies. Ian, early on in our earlier conversations had something like 3,000 variables in vendor-to-vendor relationships between companies, between Boeing and General Electric, for example, and it's down to about 7 in a CRM system because the power asymmetry is so high. So when you don't have that power asymmetry, you actually have the benefit of many variables involved in a relationship that get no respect in the current system because it's so asymmetrically set up. We have to have the invention of other is a necessity there. So I think some experience with the beachhead. But just, Keith, real quick, because I think you want to expand on that.
Yes.
At 9:00, that's exactly what we're going to talk about, Chris. Okay.
Sorry.
I don't want to wake you up.
So I don't know who is next. I think Bart.
Briefly, in Amsterdam we discussed when that Mobile Monday— you said, okay, maybe we'll get some investors down here as well to listen in. Have you talked to investors and what has been their feedback on this ground?
Yeah, well, I've talked to a number of VCs that all think it's a really good idea. I was hoping to hear Siegel, who's with— that may be the worst ringtone I've ever heard. Stepping on it again. Sounds like you're stepping on a baby. It's great. Rick Siegel in—, who has a blog called Post Money Value. He's in Toronto. And I've been trying to get him to talk to some of the people in this room, actually. He's a busy guy and it hasn't worked out yet. But he gets it. There are VCs here in town that do— Richard Dale, who's Andy Dale's brother, I've talked to a number of times. He was hoping he could be here. He couldn't make it. Andy Dale's big in the identity world. They look totally different but have exactly the same accent from whatever corner of London they're from. So on the phone it's like, who is it? Is it Andy or Richard? So, but here's what, I mean, I'll make a pitch here. You know, I think we need to get some big companies that dig it enough to pay for the work we're doing at the Berkman Center, quite frankly. That's one of the things I have not done enough of. I've got some but not enough. I guess Joe and then Nick. So I wanted to suggest a reframing, Chris.
Because I actually, I don't think users want to control their data.
That feels like a lot of work.
But users don't want to be controlled.
I think that's a very different way to think about the problem. I respectfully disagree. Oh, OK.
Well, we can talk about that later.
I don't think— Yeah, I think that's a fruitful debate.
The tension I'm having is VRM is not EDI. This is not just data plumbing. This is about technology and politics. It is about controlling data. And most of the time that I am doing something with some vendor, what I really want is no relationship. I want my coffee, and I want to drink it, and, you know, I'm not giving you my email address, but I'd like a little milk. And so what I'd love to hear about more, not just today, I'm not setting my sights too high, just in general from the whole community is how are we going to steer the initial forays in VRM to the places where the fattest part of the bat is hitting the fattest part of the ball? Because there are areas, healthcare is one of them, user-generated content is one of them, regulatory environments where companies have to prove they never had the data so they couldn't have lost it. There are areas where actually I do have a motivation as a to want VRM.
And that's where it's going to start. And rationalizing that. I think that— and that— I tell you what, write that down. I'll send it to the B-school and have somebody research that. I think that's the kind of thing where there are examples of that kind of thing. I also think in— toward Joe's point, people don't want to have to manage all their data. Well, you know, people in 1958 wouldn't want to carry their entire record collection around either, you know, or carry a bank in their pocket. If you have the tech for it that makes it easy, you can do it. So, which is, we need the tech. Even after Joe, after Nick.
Just, you know, part of what you're calling for, it sounds like, Doc, is for an open-mindedness on the part of enterprises to take accountability or consideration of users, of their constituencies, if you will, in ways that exceed their actual commercial relationship with it. Because as soon as you start talking to a person, they're going to want to talk to you not about their part of your stereo system, but why your part of the stereo system that they bought doesn't work with the rest of your stuff. And because a lot of times customer service relationships are structured in such a way as to contain the obligation to the customer as much as possible— it's not our problem because somebody else built that piece of it— how do you suggest a notion of sort of mutual or reciprocal accountability across these increasingly interdependent systems and products. I mean, where that's really the situation consumers are bridling against, along with being treated as consumers. And I don't see companies finding their way to incurring extra costs and accountability for whole ecosystems upon which we as users are dependent.
There's no magic bullet there. There's a toolbox that doesn't exist yet. An interesting angle on that, though, is that companies are challenged by data, period, right? You know, we created EDI for that. There are political issues out the wazoo. You know, Craig Burton, who I wish could have been here, too, said all technical problems are technical and political, and you will always solve the technical problems. Political ones are hard. Sales versus marketing versus customer support, who owns that? And then the tech guys, right? A big problem that I've had as a reporter for Linux Journal, as an editor for Linux Journal, is getting IT guys to talk at all because they're just under so many heels and overworked as it stands, right? They don't want more shit, right? They're already dealing with the politics as it is. We got a deal, right? So I think it's, you know, it's a toolbox that we don't have yet.
Well, is there accountability there between IT and management that needs to be taking place? Because I agree, I think that that's part of what creates strong-arm solutions to what are effectively no soft problems. Where the engineer said, well, I know what we'll do, we'll just remove that plug.
Well, here's the thing about accountability. So there's been accountability for a long time, right? And there's been especially financial accountability around around decisions that are made on high by IT managers about what's going to be used. And yet open source has succeeded almost entirely from the bottom up, from IT guys solving their own problems using it, right? And companies having to sort of ratify the fact or accept the fact that their engineers have taken over. That's what happened with IBM. IBM was taken over by its engineers. Engineers figured ways to take an old, now called, you know, an old 360 took a legacy mainframe and put 1,000 Linux boxes, virtual Linux boxes on it, and completely revitalized their mainframe business. And one guy did it at lunch, right? Nobody on high told him to do that. And he said, yeah, well, shit, we're a Linux company now. We can't help it. Everybody's using Linux, right? So, you know, it changed almost overnight, but what changed was a sea change groundswell that happened inside the company. And I don't even know where it came from. Accountability comes into that. It's just, you know, you need— and that's where it's going to work with VRM as well. I mean, there's going to be tools that all of a sudden, shit, this is working a hell of a lot better than what we had already. It isn't just that a blog— a blogger working for the company solved the problem for some customer, which is sort of now the canonical, you know, folksonomic way of looking looking at it, but there's a system here by which customers reached into the company and tweaked it and made something happen that couldn't happen before, right? And it will help the companies where the accountability comes in. It's going to help the companies rationalize things like, for example, à la carte cable TV and à la carte— because that's what the customers want. Customers don't want to have to pay one big package for all of television. They'd rather pay on an à la carte basis. That's what all these guys know, but when the When customers start telling me exactly how they want to do it, it's going to change things. But we need to provide the means for that.
There's a tension there. This is the tension I was talking about with Charles yesterday, is that you don't want to have a negotiation about every little thing. There's a threshold of transaction complexity where you don't want to do that. And so the reason you end up with all-you-can-eat phone plans and everything bundled— Because subscriptions are so much simpler. Having to negotiate a price for every damn thing I watch. And that's the potential problem with the public radio stuff you were talking about. The donation, the reason they do it in big chunks every now and then is because that's, you can say, yeah, OK, I'll give you $50 now. But there also is another problem.
Alternative. So, you know, part of what we can do is generate data, right? Just intelligence, provide intelligence. But if we're in charge of the intelligence we provide, that changes things, right? Rather than they guess at what kind of intelligence they may want. Anyway, I feel we're sucking up a lot of time.
Yeah, quick pitch actually based on Chris's comments about sometimes I don't want to build a big relationship. I just wanted to pitch the one-night Stan session in the session 8 slot. Everybody's getting a lot of humor out of that, but the point of that is to take to its logical extreme how little can I expend on building a temporary transitory relationship and getting concrete about use cases.
So— That'd be the Zipless robot. Yeah. The Zipless robot. People just can't resist. I want you to illustrate that. So— so before I— see, the book is here, so I need to look up the One last thing, and I think that this is an important one, is some of the feedback I got at the end of the day yesterday from various people. There's a tendency, because we're all working on our own stuff, and the stuff we're working on is very different. You take the sum of everything that can be done with VRM, and it's a colossally varied pile of things. And the important thing that I want to I want to bring together here and make clear this morning is that we have to be really clear on what the base value system is and what VERA is fundamentally about. And keep that in mind as we all go off in our own peripheral directions. And that's sort of the key thing. Right? Yay. Thank you very much.
