Anne Truitt Zelenka

Honestly, just because some people really like to watch sports on ESPN, does that mean they want ESPN cell phone service? Apparently not. So many companies make the mistake of thinking they should be at the center of our business and personal lives. News flash: I am at the center of my life; your company is not.

I see a parallel in the software development world, where you visit a vendor’s website for information about a component you might want to use and you get treated to the “let me be your everything” routine. Here’s our amazing architecture, here’s the platform, look how it supports everything you want, here’s how it all works together. Hey, did I say I was looking for a monogamous relationship with one single vendor? More likely you have one component that I want, and it better interoperate with what I already have installed.

Yes, true, if you own all the layers of the cake, you can make your customers look twice at the frosting you sell (and the filling and the sprinkles and the horrid-tasting sugar roses too). But increasingly that’s the exception, not the rule, because given SOA and web services interfaces and RSS and mashups it’s easier than ever to choose best of breed instead of single vendor. And even if someone does choose you as their primary vendor, that customer has more important goals than merely implementing your software. They are using your tools on the way to achieving something else, like fighting cancer or modernizing the air traffic management system or providing financial tools for managing retirement savings.

Advertisers suffer from the same narcissistic delusions as software tools vendors. Deborah Schultz reacts to the idea that advertising pushes consumers towards products and “at the center is the product:”

Shudder. This is just so wrong on so many levels.

At the center is the CUSTOMER and I don’t want things PUSHED to me and I don’t want to be MANAGED. This strongly demonstrates the dramatic need to create new attitudes and language around how to interact with the customer. This means redefining the traditional silo-ed roles of marketer, advertiser, pr, customer experience, product design.

Ken Camp sees the same dysfunction in the VoIP sector:

Vendors and developers often get sidetracked into the idea of how their products can interoperate…how they can build a platform.

Customers don’t care about a platform, and don’t care what you’re doing under the covers. Customers care about their business problems and solutions to those business problems. And the solution providers who provide solutions rather than platforms are the ones delivering on their promises. They’re the ones who will win in the market. Don’t get distracted into platforms. Focus on solutions to real problems.

There’s talk about the benefits of decentralization in the technology industry, but decentralization only gets us halfway there. The rest of the journey is recentralization, where our corporate and personal missions move to the center. That’s where they belong and where they have always been anyway, despite some companies’ beliefs to the contrary.