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…