The ultimate consumer

The ultimate consumer

: The ultimate consumers are the ones who design your products for you — so you know they will like it and buy it. In this new world, consumers will also market for you and handle customer service for you but the ultimate is when they go to the effort to tell you exactly what they want in the hopes you will give it to them, if you’re listening.

See TreoCentral Treonauts today, redesigning the Treo 650 into the Treo 710.

: UPDATES: I made a terrible mistake, attributing the redesign to TreoCentral not Treonauts, both of which I love reading. Andrew Carton was most gracious in his email to me; I would have been at least a little snarky. So I’m sorry. That’s Treonauts.

And Doc Searls is right: I should have said customer instead of consumer in all those references because it was Doc who taught me that consumer is an industrial-age word that assumes, to paraphrase the man, that we’re all sitting back, consuming content, and crapping cash. Search and replace.