Had a very interesting conversation with a friend and colleague from the other side of the fence yesterday, and realised that I hadn't recorded anything here since the end of last year. We talked about the sheer dizzying pace of change on the Interweb and how it's starting to feel impossible to predict exactly where things are going to land. In particular, and with his business person beret firmly fixed, he was feeling like mass collaboration, passable user generated content being churned out by the metric tonne, and retail being the only viable - but deeply flawed - model generating any real cash online, that business might struggle to extract any money out of the digital ocean after all. Now this might have shocked me to the core had I not been bolstered by the enveloping protection of strong coffee and (hard to justify) general optimism.
Where does this optimism come from? Hard to say, apart from the fact that selling things has always made the world go around. So business models based on advertising and retail (really the only two ways people are making money at the moment) are perhaps not as flawed as we thought they might be. iTunes is a retailer (albeit a loss making one whose ultimate goal is to sell iPods), with a new shop window. Same stuff, different distribution. Clearly the 2.0 power of the database learning us, helping us find the stuff we want faster and new things without having to leave our workstations, is a fascinating glorious, frightening, enlightenment-scale change in the way societies glue people together. But in reality, we're finding new ways to do the things people have always done: trade, talk and form groups. Perhaps the promise of the new economy will come to fruition and younger, more snake-hipped armchair commentators than me will live a different future than the one I project from my experience. Damn them.
Things progressed, as they are wont with me these days, to a certainty that the days of separation between corporate brand and consumer brand are over. In the wake of Rye Clifton's interesting film, and others like it, it now seems inevitable that consumer decisions will be influenced by the credentials of the business that makes the stuff we buy. We ended the conversation on an interesting though about the creation of millions of niche, cottage industry businesses grounded in something absolutely true and sustainable with millions of geographically dispersed customers around the world. The long tail but for everything from smoothies and paperclips to rugs, toys and lorries.
Oh, and another thing. In Japan, they really do use their mobile phones for everything. One device replaces the passport, the TV, the wallet, the personal computer and the feminine massager. Conversations with our Tokyo colleagues in the group in New York last week revealed that we have a lot to learn from East Asia. It seems that the Japanese are more comfortable with the idea of companies knowing what they like, where they are and how much they spend, and that this might be a cultural difference that precludes the same kind of wholehearted adoption in the West. Who knows, but whatever, I've got to go to Japan to find out for myself.
