Note to Doc

Saturday, December 22, 2007 by Dave Winer.

Blogs are one of the few Vendor Relationship Management tools we have that actually work. 

Someday we'll have elaborate information systems that allow a negative customer experience, one with privacy and security implications, to propogate far and wide, quickly. The vendor will feel pressure from customers immediately. Today our ability to influence vendors is very limited. But it isn't going to stay that way for long. 

I note that there's never any fine-print gotchas when I'm about to make a $3500 purchase from Apple. It's all smooth sailing. It's only when my only power is to blog the experience that they hit me with the bad news. So our response has to be to make the blogging experience more powerful. (Interestingly this is where the Edgeio idea might have had some sway, not in selling products to customers, but selling information about vendors to customers (and of course competitors).) 

This became part of the discussion in the previous post. I wanted to make sure Doc Searls saw this since he's been carrying the torch on VRM.