Personalization everywhere
by
Charlie Bess
In Rom Evslin's Fractals of Change blog, there was an entry: Daddy, What's a channel, that made me think about some of the comments I've made before about personalization.
He's discussing the current trend for buying individual songs and programs instead of someone else's assembly of what you should want. He mentioned a Friend who's son said "What's a record" when entering a record store as an example of how things have changed.
With personalized aggregation and SOA, will we be getting to the point of people asking "Why would anyone want to own their own computer?" or "Why buy an entire ERP system when I only want services X,Y and Z?"
I ate in a restaurant last night with some people I'd given a Next Big Thing presentation to earlier in the day and when the hostess handed us the menu, it had the logo of the company I presented to at the top and EDS' logo at the bottom. This was an unexpected example of a small business (the restaurant) who recognized that a little personalization can have an impact.
There are probably limits to the economic possibilities of personalized service though, I doubt that it will ever get to the point that people who have color vision deficiency will only need to pay for black and white because they don't use the colors.
