Online shared intelligence

I have been using the iPad for two days, savoring its nuances and details. I will spare you the review (good reviews have been already written). Rather, I am going to share with my belief that Apple has been finally castrated by suits. Innovation is dead, long live good business. So much care has been put into making sure that the (increasingly stale) advantage Apple holds in packaging and integration is preserved and protected from cannibalization, that the iPad (and the company, and Jobs) have lost their balls.

Jobs’ life-long envy of “what it could have been” has just been put to sleep: Apple has become Microsoft. 

Let’s say that every large company out there (you only care about CRM when you are large) all of the sudden changes their hearts; starting today, they will care about customers, they will want to establish meaningful relationships with them (meaningful Relationships require trust, trust requires caring, and vice-versa). Even if that happened today, tomorrow, and a hundred years after, Social CRM would still be an oxymoron, a catch phrase invented by the enterprise-1.1 vendors like SalesForce.com.

CRM was at its peak a few years ago when AT&T and MCI used to call you a combined 100 times a week, ignoring your requests to be left alone. That’s how customers’ relationships were (and still are) “managed”. Social CRM is the next chapter, a vision where your desires are still ignored, where the support lines are still deaf, were you and now *your friends* are bombarded, where everything you say, whether it’s in Flicker, Facebook or whatever, will be used against you to sell you the next piece of crap.

You see, “social” and “CRM” can not coexist in the same name…

Welcome to Texas! Leave your brain behind, you won’t be using it here!

Alaska Airlines distributes religious material in their food trays. They know you may not be a catholic, or christian, but they don’t care: if you don’t like it so be it. I say NO, I don’t like it and I choose not to spend my $12,000 a year with Alaska any more. You should do the same, even if you ARE religious. The principle of being respected in your beliefs is at stake.

Apple is becoming more and more Big Brother and less and less the innovator; that is wrong, and outbalances their ability to deliver well-packaged functionality. It’s time to start favoring other challengers, and the phone market is full of them.

COX Cable censors some numbers and you cannot call them. That has nothing to do with content, or porno, or any other convoluted excuse. They do it because they don’t make sufficient money on those numbers. So, I will cancel all their services, and walk away happy that they won’t have my $60,000 every ten years.

Silverlight, Microsoft’s latest piece of bloatware, is here to compete with Flash, a slick, multi-platform media delivery platform. Just to convince you that it is needed (why, oh, why, would we need another plugin), it will bomb your machine mercilessly. Unless, of course, it is running Windoz… Typical Microsoft.

A friend asked me if I was planning to get an iPad. I started answering “I haven’t decided yet” and then, without even an inflection on my voice, before ending the sentence I added to it “why I will buy it”. In other words, the decision to buy it is already there, I will just need to think of a valid justification. Further, the decision is there because I have a lot of speculative reasons to buy it, but still the purchase will be compulsive. Hats off to Apple for getting me in this unconditional purchase mode… So, I thought, let’s commit to this blog the reasons I can think of at this time, and get back to check the accuracy of my predictions in four months.

Evernote, with its apparently simple functional set, and the humble “note” as key metaphor, is taking over the domain of more and more applications, and in the process becoming irreplaceable for me. Makes me wander if “note taking” is not a term that has suffered excessive trivialization…