Building a better relation ship, one conversation at a time

Several thousand years ago, back in the mid-'80s, I wrote a white paper for Motorola Computer Systems (when there was such a thing) on "Workgroup Computing". It got the attention of IDG, the big technology magazine publisher, which invited me to Boston, where I addressed a large crowd on the subject and experienced my first taste of punditry. For a short while there, I was an Authority on "groupware".

Humility on the same subject was later administered by Reese Jones, the founder and CEO of Farallon Computing. Reese was a brain researcher at UC-Berkeley when he invented the PhoneNet connector, and found himself running a fast-growing start-up that became a client of the PR agency I ran at the time. After reading my white paper, Reese dismissed its conclusions so conclusively that I don't even remember what they were.

What Reese taught me was this: people do not communicate in groups, but rather in pairs, even when the pair is one-to-many. Each of the many is attending focally to only one voice, one source, at a time. They have no choice about that, because the human brain isn't built to hear and understand what many are saying at once. It can pick up some generalities, perhaps, but not details.

Humans are conversing creatures, Reese told me. The fundamental social structure is not the group, but the pair. That's why Reese's favorite technology was not computing, but telephony. In the long run, he said, the software that mattered most would support the essentially one-to-one, peer-to-peer nature of personal communication, and of personal relationships.

Without what I learned from Reese, I doubt I ever would have come up with the line "Markets are conversations", which later became the first thesis of The Cluetrain Manifesto.

That phrase was uttered again last November by J.P. Rangaswami, CIO of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW), at the Cal-IT Europe Forum in London. Rangaswami's emphasis was on relationships between two parties in the IT marketplace: vendors and customers. "There is a growing sense that things are changing," he said. Those changes pointed toward "removal of two classes that stood in the way of the buyer": the reseller and the consultant. "The intermediate class is being driven out."

In its place, he said, is a new and more active relationship between vendor and customer. "It is of value to me that I can understand the culture of the firm. Company ethos helps select if the company is congruent with my objectives as much as my management styles." To sum it up, he said, "Relationship is not just a contract".

To J.P., relationship is involvement. While companies like his are doing more DIY (do it yourself) work, they are also reaching out to vendors who need help from customers in developing and adapting their products. "Can you support it?" he asks. "If you can, come and show us, then lets work on a pilot".

All those quotes of J.P. come from notes taken by Ross Mayfield, founder and CEO of SocialText*, an "enterprise social software" company that counts Rangaswami and DrKW among its customers. (Disclosure: I'm on the Socialtext advisory board.) One reason is a shared interest in open source development. Kwiki, for example. Ross says, "JP became a customer in part because they started off using our open source kwiki. Now he values how it reduces lock-in." For his part, J.P. says (again from Ross' notes), "Today, I need merit to be the sale. I will find ways of consuming the merit... Make sure your product is great and everything else follows".

Where does that greatness come from? How can a vendor make a great product today? Do you get it by hunkering down in silence and coming out with something really cool that you hope the customer likes and buys? Or do you get it by talking with customers all through the development process, so your product has merit that the likes of J.P. and DrKW can consume?

I think conditions in the past may have favored the former; but that conditions now --in networked markets where everybody is one click away from each other -- favor the latter.

Phil Windley, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University and former CIO of Utah, says,

There was this feeling I had frequently when I was CIO. Vendors would come in and say, "Tell me about your objectives". I always hated that because most of the time I could tell they didn't really care. Instead they were like my teenager trying to sell me on something. No matter what I said my objectives were, they'd tell me how their product met them.

I had one guy who wasn't like that, though. He'd show up and bring a white paper (usually not from his company) about something he'd seen, that he knew I was interested in; and we'd discuss it. We developed a relationship. And I appreciated it for that. Eventually he had something he sold me.

Conversation used to be optional. Now it's mandatory. Tom Limoncelli, co-author of The Practice of System Administration, and Director of IT Services at Cibernet Corp., says "When I'm on the phone with a vendor I usually am surfing his competitor's web site while talking with him". His point, however, is not about kicking tires. It's about a better kind of leverage. "In this networked market," he adds, "There are no secrets -- only relationships."