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.

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.