In the case of Amazon, who knew that collecting information about customers would prove to be so drastically beneficial for a company? Of course, knowing your customers is always important, but Amazon goes a lot further than just knowing. If I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for, I can, for example, type into Google or Amazon some keywords and they (Google or Amazon) make the pieces and find me the best options. The example of MP3.com shows how useful a complete understanding of customers can be. In exchange for service, music anywhere, MP3.com just required that you tell them what you have, music wise. Thus, they could market to you and other people who showed similar preferences better than before by filtering out everything customers would be uninterested in or even annoyed by.
Perhaps the most interesting thing to note about how the Google and Amazon work is that the people who founded these companies or wrote the algorithms did merely that. They rely on everyone else make their business to succeed. As more people search, type, and click, Google has better results for the next time you Google something. The more you use Amazon the better it will be able to customize its options for you and tailor your wants according to your displayed tastes. Many of the examples shown in the Remix surrounding these ideas all make the workload for the customer almost none existent. People no longer have to put in a great deal of effort to find that one song or movie or book. They can just go online, type in a few key words and within seconds it is there in front of you. Speaking from my own experience, I can be kind of lazy at times, the less work it requires me to do other work means I’m more than likely to use this tool (Google or Amazon) again, and again…
I think the idea of websites such as Amazon being able to refer you to other music based on your previous music purchases is somewhat related to Lessig's idea of a sharing economy. When we use Amazon to purchase a CD or a movie, we aren't looking to receive anything from Amazon other than the CD or the movie, but we may get a suggestion for another CD or movie from them that we decide to look into and find that we enjoy. In this case, we gave Amazon our money for one item and in turn were given something else to enjoy.
ReplyDeleteYou are discussing less about the hybrid economy, and more about the idea of commercial sharing. Now, most of the commercial sharing, if not all, take place online, like you mentioned with the Amazon and Google examples. MP3.com also shows this sharing idea because the company wants you to sign up for it so you can buy or download tracks, and sometimes the tracks are for free. The company in exchange gets money, but they also can tell you what you've bought and market directly to your tastes.
ReplyDeleteGoogle could be considered the commercial sharing of ideas, and Amazon tailors your searches to stuff you previously searched for. These commercial sharing sites are trying to learn about you, the individual.