Customize Into a Black Hole
Excerpts from a Chad Dickerson column:
Gary Barnett, research director at analyst company Ovum, writes in...noting the tendency of IT to overcustomize solutions for problems that might have simple commodity solutions.... “In the world of IT, it is almost impossible to find a standard, uncustomized and untinkered-with business application, in part because we’ve all convinced ourselves that our need is unique — that we’re NASCAR — when in truth most of the things we do with technology are closer to Stop & Shop than they are Daytona. One of the hardest but most important things that we all need to learn is when we want something plain, reliable, and cheap and when it makes sense for us to pimp things up.”
But there's still a ton of business looking to serve that oxymoron, COTS customization. Take Inserso, please:
Your organization is unique, with its own individual challenges and goals. Even so, there might be Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) products available that could be customized to meet your specific needs. In many cases, Inserso’s COTS customizations save clients money while providing a stable product – and without sacrificing functionality.
But if COTS customization isn't enough for you, go ahead and get Extreme Customization™ from WhatHelps:
Extreme Customization™ Instructions
Follow these steps to make your page(s) perfectly match your web site....
Step 1: Create a Customization Template. A customization template is a web page that has an empty column or table where you want page content (e.g. message board, chat room, classifieds, calendar) to display. The easiest way to create a Customization Template that matches your web site, is to (a) copy the HTML from an existing web page, and (b) remove the text/graphics from the main area of the page....
Step 2: Complete the form with your choice of font face/size and color settings. Your site's colors should be listed in the body tag near the top of your customization template....
Step 3: Click the link for HEAD. Copy/paste the code between head and /head on your customization template into the form....
Unfortunately, no one has come up with manic customization or uncontrollable customization yet. This would be for the companies that are more unique than any other company. If you want to advertise to these companies, then your brochure to them would be printed in a quantity of one...and the brochure would be created in a home-grown application...written in assembler code...using a chip of your own design.
If you think you're special and elite, Ian Angell is your guru (or at least he was back in October 2000 - he's probably passe now:
If Ian Angell is right about the future of the new economy, most of the world is screwed. From his vantage point as professor of information systems at the prestigious London School of Economics (LSE), Angell, 53, spins a scenario of the future in which the world's business and technical elite use the Net to live wherever they want and to do whatever they please, without government intrusion. Leveraging their wealth and their much-in-demand professional skills, the chosen few (who really aren't so few) can live in countries that will bid to have them as residents -- through offers of tax relief and through promises of noninterference in their affairs.
What will governments get in return? The unprecedented wealth-creating power of this group of charmed individuals, whom Angell calls the "new barbarians." And what will become of the billions of people who are left behind? For some unfortunates, it will be a world of chaos, run by gangs of thugs. Others will live under the "tyranny of democracies" -- societies where people will have votes, but where the majority will be ruled by racial, religious, and ethnic bigots.
So much for teary-eyed talk about the "digital divide." Most of that earnest but shopworn discussion focuses on the powerlessness of the have-nots. So what about the haves? After all, they are the ones who will be in charge -- the agenda setters, the power brokers, and the virtual architects of the new digital order. What will their world look like? Angell has thought a lot about that question.
His answer reflects an unabashedly somber vision, sort of like Free Agent Nation on a global acid trip. Self-interest and security are the mantras of Angell's new barbarians. Commerce and communities are disembodied, existing for the most part on the Internet. Government's role is to shelter new barbarians from the scourge of disease, to protect the food supply, and to provide a clean, well-lighted place for data, the plasma of the new economy.
Who would want to live in such a world? Ian Angell, for one. His recent book, The New Barbarian Manifesto: How to Survive the Information Age (Kogan Page, 2000), conjures up a world that makes the brutal Darwinist ecology of Blade Runner seem downright benign. But Angell isn't offering remedies for rescuing society from such a fate. He believes that this dark world can't come soon enough.
"I'm an anarchic capitalist," says Angell. "I believe that business should be running the world. Every major technological shift creates winners and losers. Europe's a disaster because of a sentimental attachment to the welfare state, which is just a vestige of the Industrial Age, when politicians extracted taxes to buy votes."...
Companies such as A.T. Kearney, Cambridge Technology Partners Inc., USB Warburg, and Warner Lambert Co. have invited him to speak at their corporate gatherings, hoping that he'll shake things up with speeches about the changing nature of work, the end of democracy, and, of course, winners and losers. "When the consultants want to rattle their technologists, I get up and talk about how methods are dangerous and statistics are worthless, because they make for tidy minds," he says....
Bad science fiction? It would be, if there weren't a serious core to Angell's arguments: Who can really argue with the proposition that elite knowledge workers can dictate their demands to governments, as opposed to the other way around? At the end of his book, Angell offers a few pointers on how to become a new barbarian: Get an elitist education; keep your assets liquid, and spread them around the globe; familiarize yourself with economic hot spots that will be the most receptive to people like you. And finally, "Be ready to flee at a moment's notice."
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