I have a general philosophy on the evolution of the B2C and B2B relationship, one that is inspired by history. Let’s look at some examples. Money first took the form of barter, then gold, then coins, then paper, and now bits and bytes. Transport: on foot (great shoe-sales), animals (great stable-sales), cars (great garage sales), planes (great duty free sales), and finally tele-conferencing (great device sales). Books: handwritten, handprinted, printing-press, mass-media, internet, iPad / Kindle. At every turn, something was replaced, an industry was destroyed, yet it was for the purpose of evolution. Don’t get me started on evolution itself, as that is all about destructive replacement.

The point about all of these is not about destructive replacement. It’s about improving a product in the eyes of the consumer. And what enabled this improvement? Common standards, collaboration, user-feedback, guts, ruthlessness, innovation, progress, etc. Why producers don’t like to cooperate with that? Because every technology requires an investment to make it work.

Think of the poor embroiderer, which is what inspired this post (bound to get a lot of flack). It’s a funny industry. I wasn’t aware that needlework designs are being sold over the internet and thus at the risk of piracy. I suppose I always thought an embroiderer embroids, then sells their product and ships it to consumers. Instead, they seem to go to the simplest side-product of their work, the one that becomes a foundation for potential mass-production, the “design-chart,” which is then being “shipped,” via download, to customers. Interesting! It kinds of makes sense from a distribution standpoint. Customers are not willing to pay for the shipment of needlework, instead they prefer producing locally, which really is a great idea. The only problem here is the way it is distributed.

In a B2C relationship over the internet, I think, it always comes down to eliminating as many barriers as possible. When you buy from an online shop, you really want the product in your house as quickly as possible. If I could reach my arm into the screen in front of me and pull out the product that I just ordered, that would be just perfect. It’s worse when the product is digital, because the customer knows that it’s just bits & bytes really not worth anything tangible (I’m just talking about the 1s & 0s here) and it could be in the customer’s home in a millisecond. Instead, business erect as many barriers as they possibly can, whether it’s a big ‘copyrighted’ sign across a picture, an overly complex signup/payme page, or the somewhat convoluted iTunes-model, where it really is easier to pay than to pirate.

But in the light of evolution, these barriers are bound to be broken! The same reason why gold is no longer a form of payment, because it’s really heavy and annoying to handle, the world of commerce has a way of evolving towards something easier and easier and easier, until finally I pay by waving a magic wand (eh RFID chip) across a panel.

Let’s get back to embroidery. The problem is two-fold. 1. fragmentation, because any solution that I am about to propose will not get blanket acceptance. 2. the silly notion that selling designs, which seems like the most valuable thing an embroiderer has to offer (actual IP), is something that should be done in a direct B2C relationship. In the light of consumers constantly wanting to break barriers, this offering of valuable IP seems like an industry-defeating purpose.

So what are possible solutions?

• consolidation & protection. Basically the iTunes model, where everything is placed behind a secure window that can preferably only be accessed via a specific device (my personal belief is that anything bits & bytes will eventually be free as that is not where the real value lies).
• selling designs via local shops. If the problem is distribution, why not partner with local shops that keep your designs behind bars and just print out the end-product for consumers.
• selling designs via the machines that produce needlework. No idea what they are called, but they have a strong incentive to keep their machines being used and have a direct line to consumers.

I’m sure any of the above is a solution with problems, but my point is the following:

• Piracy will continue to exist and will become worse if you make it easy for people to pirate.
• Consumer products evolve in a fashion that keeps pushing out inefficiencies and piracy is one of the quickest ways online to remove these inefficiencies.
• The only way to prevent privacy is to not distribute anything that can be distributed via bits & bytes.

Case in point: the idiot that just walked into an Apple store and jailbroke every damn iPhone 4 on display.

Last point: I am not advocating piracy. I run a company myself, I have a business degree, and I believe in getting paid for your work. But I do believe silly strategies deserve to get punished. And there are plenty, plenty, plenty of them that I have mentioned on this blog over the years.

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A part in the series of just writing out an idea and rambling on it on this blog.

One of the core architectural big ideas of the web is that each resource, or web page has an URL or a link, and other pages can link to them. However, in the “social media” reiteration, these links are called “permalinks” in a strange doublespeak way as the ordinary Web 0.1 links were meant to be permanent as well and, instead, “link rot” seems to be more prevalent as ever with short-url services and other strange URL schemes.

I am of the opinion that we make a great injustice to discussion on the web by calling those things that hang on the bottom of web pages (and hence do have URLs) “comments” and, as non-entities of the web, only rarely have URLs of their own (even of the hash-variety). This is the second injustice. It is often that in these “comments” there are real gems, but you can’t refer to them with any direct link.

The worst offender, unsurprisingly, is Facebook, which from a cultural-historical viewpoint is going to be a huge black hole. It is in a stark constrat to Twitter, where each tweet has an URL. There are many social “objects” on Facebook that are completely inactionable and this is completely against the very nature of the Web. Technically, with stuff like Activity Streams, it’s possible to “like” a “like” and so on, but this isn’t possible from most social network tools’ user interface.

From the Web point of view, having URL for each tweet might be one reason why Twitter is gaining more steam and Facebook is struggling. Twitter is actively becoming a part of the Web, while Facebook is actively trying to turn the Web into Facebook (see Open Graph and Wikipedia-entry Pages) – this walled garden -strategy has always failed on the web, but it hasn’t stopped businesses from trying.

My thinking might be biased because I’m a firm believer in the open web and the idea that the web promotes openness and sharing of ideas, but not in the way Facebook has recently tried to open its users’ identities and “life streams” to the world. I believe the web is a great platform for collaboration and it’s a shame that while (as Tim Berners-Lee has pointed out) there is no shortage of URLs, we don’t give them out to all objects that live on the web.

However, the one exception that I’m willing to make are YouTube comments, which in number exceed the amount of information (with a loose definition of “information) in the library of Alexandria, but loss of which absolutely no-one would cry over.

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I’m currently on a tirade against two things. Global package delivery, which, every single time, seem to have me waste my time waiting for a doorbell to ring. And software-updates, which for some reason are a pretty fragmented affair.

OK, there’s nothing to do about software updates and I already give up.

Global package delivery, on the other hand… UPS was founded in 1907. That’s right, gentlemen & ladies, it is over ONE ZERO ZERO (purposefully emphasised) years old! That means that people have been carrying UPS parcels around on horses, then on Fords, on ships, on aeroplanes, and will most likely carry them to space also. Unlike regular mail, the Package Industry is here to stay as well, ladies and gentlemen, all thanks to you for ordering from places like Amazon every single day.

Now, I don’t mean to pick on UPS. I actually have a problem with FEDEX (founded 1973) this week and with DHL (a German company, founded 1969), both of which like telling me things on their website that aren’t true, or are true, but so incredibly late to publish that truth that it’s just a false truth.

Dear companies that I just mentioned: we are in the age of real-time. When my best friends go to the bathroom, I know about it 5 min. before they even think about it, that’s how quick Twitter is. Sadly, that doesn’t bring a hot new gadget into my life, like your great service does. I appreciate your service, it allows me to be lazy and order to Visa’s delight. But it’s meant to be a service of convenience, and I don’t consider having to drool over my doorbell-phone by any kind of definition, “a convenience.”

Here’s what happened with DHL: Package shipped on the 6th out of Germany. On the 7th, at 4:30 a.m., package left Germany heading for the Netherlands. I sent them a mail asking whether if it doesn’t arrive today, they ship on the weekends. No reply! At 20:00, I found out, that package has arrived for sorting at a sorting centre at 17:42. I decide to call the next day to ask whether they ship on the weekends. The kind person at DHL the Netherlands informs me that a. he has no idea where my package is and b. they do not ship on the weekends. 2 hours later, the doorbell rings. It’s the mailman, who works for TNT (the Dutch equivalent to DHL) with the package from DHL. Status on the website on the 8th: “7th of May, package has arrived for sorting at a sorting centre at 17:42.”

Here’s what happened with FEDEX: Package shipped on the 5th from the US. Paris then somewhere in the Netherlands on the 6th. Estimated delivery: on the 7th at 6 p,m. I’m home at 3:30 p.m. At 20:00 I get a message that FEDEX passed by my house at 14:55 p.m. and no one was home. Status: sadly FEDEX does not receive phone-calls on the weekend.

We need a change, we need that thing you do with the tracing, not to be restricted to when it arrives in parcel sorting centre 42. We need it to have an RFID chip in the parcel, which is connected to a GPS device in the truck, which at all times tells a satellite to send me a tweet of where exactly you are at what given time. And when I’m not home, I can tweet back to said truck to give notice, to save fuel, to save the planet, and/or to change the address to my work-address. Saves your time and mine and the planet’s.

This is not rocket-science. GPS exists (globally since 2000), RFID exists (required by Wal-Mart since 2005), real-time web exists (Twitter since 2006). Yet for some reason, in 2010, I still have to wait 10 hours for an update about something REAL & RELEVANT that happened 10 hours ago. Sigh.

OK, all ranted out now. Now go fix.

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