neo narrative nexus

New technologies enter a market by targeting exisiting practices that are ripe for opportunistic tech exploitation. By lessening the time to perform exisiting practices and extending the horizon of applicability, they pay for themselves and are adopted. That is a necessary step in bootstrapping the technology, but once adopted, users of the technology respond to it by creating new usage patterns, enabled by the new tech. Patterns that disclose how a business works in new ways. As such they reveal the world in which next technologies will work. Within those horizons the next tech must act.

Specific technologies, such as business applications, disclose practices and prompt us to construct narratives around their disclosures. The introduction of the CRM shows up some firms as custodians of databases, media producers, business services, and dealers in digital properties. Even small firms are disclosed as "multinational" as they position themselves in the global network economy. These disclosures appear in the way practitioners now talk about themselves, and the narratives they construct and in which they position themselves. Whether these firms now do business differently than they used to is another question, but they tend to see their business in different ways, and they construct new narratives, not least around issues of computing needs.

The way a user describes their work takes over metaphors from the CRM software, and vice versa. CRM becomes an activity along a chain of production, whether or not every participant uses the software. Having come under the disclosive ambit of the software, CRM is never the same again.

Applications provide spaces in which users can think what has hitherto been unthought. These processes are at work in what CRM discloses about customers to businesses. So listen to your new customers.

Aptly appropriated from Kevin Coyne's Technoromanticism, except for enpropriations entertained.

A cute try at searching

On Google or Yahoo when I search "blanché" I get a different set of results from when I type "blanche".

On MSN when I search "blanché" I get the results for "blanche".

Chronological challenges

Microsoft SBA Targeted for H1 2006

According to Karan Khanna, product manager for Microsoft's forthcoming Small Business Accounting (now in beta testing), Microsoft is aiming for a release of the platform in the first half of 2006. Microsoft had previously announced product availability in late 2005. From the transcript of The .NET Show featuring SBA:

"ROBERT HESS: Now Christin mentioned that we were in the beta phase right now in this application. When does it actually come out into the market for real?

KARAN KHANNA: The plan is in the first half of next year you would have the application available. But it's in beta right now. "

Yes, but the .NET Show was recorded in 2004. So SBA should be available in the first half of 2005.

Helping personnel enown their customers

This story on ZDNet says CRM for small businesses is growing:

Global CRM spend among small and medium-sized businesses will be close to $2 billion by 2008--more than double what it is today.

The more interesting bit is this realization:

Wettemann demonstrated her point about sharing by asking the audience, mainly comprised of RightNow customers, to swap pens with the person next to them without looking. "How many people want to keep the pen they have been given now?" she asked. "Companies implementing CRM need to overcome people's natural barriers -- we all like our own pens. People with really nice pens need incentives."

But the insight is lost here. It's not just people need incentives (or bribes, as the title puts it) to share. At some level people need incentives to do anything. It's not merely about incentives to share what you have. The insight is that people are attached to what they own. Not own in the sense of owning valuable property, but owning in the sense of assimilating something as one's own. That's what CRM software needs to do, to lead users to make customers their own.

humans serving the makina

Ellen Ullman in the NYTimes on the The Boss in the Machine:

Notice that it's supposed to be the chip, not the human, that goes off to do something else while the keyboard idles. But internal engineering principles have a way of becoming external; software designers unconsciously adopt the values of the machine they're working on. After years of working in an environment where efficiency is a god and idleness in any component is intolerable, a programmer comes to think it's logical to keep humans as busy as possible.

Did you know Extended MAPI can be fun?

No, but Dmitry Streblechenko has a bunch of neat stuff for Outlook. I found this page on MAPI Tables enlightening.

Great for decompiling C# assemblies

Lutz Roeder's Reflector for .NET is a nifty little tool for studying the code inside .NET assemblies.

newsgroup via google groups

microsoft.public.outlook.bcm