When you want to know what the next five years will look like, it is usually a good idea to listen a Doc Searls speech.

Doc - who I still hope to be able to invite one day at LIFT (he said he would love to come in 08 but since got buried under an overload of emails) - talks about Vendor Relationship Management, or the final step in the power transfer from vendors to consumers, what Doc also refers to as the intention economy. From his speech at Leweb3.

We will be able to manage vendors at least as well as they manage us. We are calling this VRM, Vendor Relationship Management. The project is being launched within the Harvard’s Berkman Center. The core concept is that the individual should be able to manage their relationships with their vendors and suppliers, based on the idea that they actually know more about specific preferences, updated data, etc.
Link

Imagine VRM on a large scale. You would have something even more powerful than stock markets: real time consumer-driven indicators, forcing vendors into behaving better because of this freely available pulse. Consumer dictatorship. It will happen, and probably create a whole new set of issues (consumers not reading the manual and complaining about things they should have known, competitors sending in fake reviews, etc…).

This entry was posted on Monday, December 17th, 2007 at 6:35 pm and is filed under business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.