<i>&gt; The 1:1 future will be characterised by customised production,</i>
<i>&gt; individually addressable media and 1:1 marketing. Instead of</i>
<i>&gt; market share, the goal of most business competition will</i>
<i>&gt; be share of customer - one customer at a time.</i>
I think this is absolutely inevitable. As consumers eliminate many time
demands, increase their awareness levels and expectations of business, the
demands for personalised products at competitive prices will continue to
increase. Increases in the programmability of production facilities and
media will drive this trend even further.
Consider the following examples:
* Several computer companies are making notable inroads on the business
by producing custom systems.
* Satellite dish technology and pay per view programming are making
"personalised TV" a reality. This trend promises to grow further as
two way DBS systems become common.
* Information mining software, combined with intelligent editing, makes
the delivery of custom reports and abstracts possible at ever
increasing levels of sophistication.
* The Sega channel. Pick your game from the carousel.
* Yahoo! and other search engines owe a great deal of their popularity
to the fact that they can automatically deliver personalised lists
of resources, with unique and unexpected cross-referencing as demanded
by the user.
Many more examples could be given, from coffee mugs to kit cars. The
opportunity presented by this trend is tremendous. Java, as one example,
presents a means to exploiting the technology of the Internet to provide
such personalised information resources. I will be willing to wager, in
fact, that the next truly killer app will be one that allows for even
greater individualism in the use of the net and its resources.
I will also predict a completely new career will emerge among online
professionals. The "collation specialist". A person who can take a set of
guidelines and use them to do nothing but assemble useful directories of
URLs, with intelligent commentary, in ways that current "spiders" cannot.
The 'net includes the "many to many" model, in the form of newsgroups,
the "one to many" in the form of web pages and newsletters, and of course,
the "one to one" in email.
Decide for yourself - Which do you treat as being more important ? Those
feelings are the basis for the trend.
Paul Myers (1:260/158) arkham@buffnet.net
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