December 10, 2006
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When the Crystal Ball is All Fogged Over
This post by super-smart Scott Karp gets to the heart of the situation in the media world right now:
The problem is that, in the this increasingly complex networked 2.0 world, customers don’t know what they need. And providers don’t know either. What happens when the buy side and the sell side are wandering lost in the fog?I keep coming back to this Henry Ford quote:
“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.”As much as media is obsessed with the scarcity of attention, the real scarcity is in innovation.
Nice crystallization.
Posted December 10, 2006 at 12:22 | Comments (2) | Permasnark
File under: Briefly Noted, Media Galaxy
File under: Briefly Noted, Media Galaxy
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This is why our team has basically stopped asking our "customers" (read: in-house ops people for whom we write web apps) what they want, and started just asking what their problems are.
Beautiful.
But what if they don't even know what their problems are? I mean, when you're talking not about getting your job done and instead about, say, being entertained or enriched somehow... it's not necessarily straightforward, is it?