March 22, 2010

2.    The shift has already begun. The financial reporting industry has already embraced the semantic web and has built the largest commercial ecosystem of online, interoperable data so far. Many other industries are gearing up to follow. Your industry is no exception.

3.    Products will be pulled. As you take a product off the shelf, you’ll be pulling on the entire supply chain, causing a ripple effect back to the manufacturer. Your customers will start pulling your products from you, rather than you pushing them. Customers will be much more involved in product development; cycles will shorten dramatically.

4.    Big hint: This goes for marketing, too. Push marketing will become less and less relevant. Customers will say what they are looking for and you will have to respond on their terms, not yours.

5.    Services will be pulled as well. A building will order its own supplies and maintenance services. Your services may be combined with those of your competitor without you even knowing it. Customers will dictate the terms and you will have to go along.

6.    Most business processes will invert. The sales-oriented or solutions-oriented culture many companies have will be much less profitable, as market and customer-driven processes rise. Customers will soon be in a position to enter their desires in a way that can fit into your manufacturing or production processes directly.

7.    Customers will become ten times more powerful!They will keep the customer-relationship on their side. Projects like the VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) Project at Harvard and OpenID will put customers much more in charge.

8.    Pulling will have a profound impact on our entire economy. More than $3 trillion of our economy will be affected. Everything from retail to health care to the IRS will be streamlined by the principles of pull.

9.    Watch for the warning signs of push cancer. Push is about vendor lock-in and proprietary data strategies. Apple and Facebook are push companies—they will both face strong competition from the open web. They will both have to change their cultures to embrace pull or they will become much smaller.

10.   Watch for the signs of pull. Pull is the natural way businesses should work to put the customer first. When you hear about companies opening their data, giving customers account portability, and talking about interoperability with competitors, that’s the language of pull. Google embraces some of the principles of pull, but we’ll see how far they go. There is a lot at stake—learn now to open your corporate culture to the principles that will shape successful 21st century companies.

The first industry to implement pull was the bowling industry, which thirty years ago changed from people keeping score to the equipment keeping score automatically in real time. That simple innovation saved the industry as it made bowling more accessible. Media is going through it now. Yours is next.

David Siegel is an author, angel investor, and public speaker in New York City. He is the author of four books about the Internet. His latest book, Pull: the Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business explains the shift from pushing information to pulling it, and the impact that will have on business. You can also follow him on Twitter at @pullnews.

Join the conversation ( 3 )

• Michael Uschold 1 year 9 months and 24 days ago

  

  Good article, clearly explained. Push/Pull is an interesting way to view the market shift. One niggle: I don't see how adding an auto-scoring convenience to bowlers is an example of pull. Pull seems to be about changing the relationship between customers and vendors, where the latter ask for what they want and vendors respond with offerings, instead of having options put in their face all the time by vendor advertising.
  
  Asking for a new feature is an example of asking for what you want, and if the vendor responds with the new feature, that is nice, but that has been going on forever, it is called user feedback, and keeping the customer happy.
  
  But in the bowling example the relationship between customer and vendor is exactly the same before and after the extra convenience of automatic scorekeeping. The way they find bowling alleys is unchanged.
  
  This seems to me, fundamentally different from other examples of pull, and thereful not a good example.
  

• Octavian Mihai (PMP) 1 year 10 months and 11 days ago

  

  David, good insights. I especially enjoy your simple no drama style. I am not sure of a couple points though.
  - Openid and such are great theoretical endeavors not sure if they will become tool norms. If they will they will reinforce another sort of customer lock-in and control...
  - I would like to know your definition of semantic web (in your book maybe?)
  - Not sure Facebook is a push company. Apple arguably yes.
  - Editorial / Expert push will always exist and be on demand.
  - Democratic recommendation engines only work for certain type of products / services.
  
  I'll stop here. Again good article. Will check out your book.
  

• WALTER GILBERT 1 year 10 months and 12 days ago

  

  Good read and for the most part right on. I would disagree with your example of Apple and Facebook in point 9, however. Apple fully embraces open web standards and all their products support open web standards. There is obviously business benefit in their model as it relates to "control" of the entire widget, from hardware to software, and that is a unique selling proposition that has enabled them to dominate in the way that they have in recent years. As for Facebook, I think you may have case, there, but to play devil's advocate for a moment, as long as they continue to keep their API open and accessible, even they are somewhat immune to the "push cancer" you mention.
  
  Again, great article with good information to digest and think about as this century continues to unfold.