April 4, 2006
“business as morality”
“Business as Morality”.
There’s an interesting e-mail exchange going on between Doc Searls and O’Reilly Media. Basically, what seperates Web 2.0 from Web 1.0 is morality, as Doc explains so eloquently here:
I think some of what we see in Web 2.0 (a term I’ve never liked, much as I like Tim, who has done the most to promulgate it… I think it’s what we’ll call the current bubble and the next crash) is the morality of generosity. At eTech, I saw a preview of a browser-based Photoshop/Album organizing/print product front-end service. The biggest thing the creator wanted to show was how generous Flickr is. “Watch this,” he said, before using Flickr’s API to suck all 6000+ of my photos from Flickr into his product. All the metadata, all the tags and associations, were intact. His point: Flickr isn’t a silo. Their closed and proprietary stuff doesn’t extend, not is it used, to lock up customer or user data. It’s wide open. Free-range. Most of all, however, it is a “good citizen”. It is generous where it counts. Nurturing.
Worth a read. Worth a think.
[Doc Searls’ homepage is here.]
I couldn’t agree more — businesses with a conscience are likely to be much more accepted by suspsicious customers. In many cases, customers are customers because they like the product, not necessarily the company. In close competition with identical products, it is the companmy that builds the relationship that wins.
p.s. can you teach me to draw?!!
So are we saying generosity is a new “feature” or “benefit,” or do we actually have to care?