

Tom Tom sells Customer driving data to cops, apologizes - suarezkop
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tomtom_apologizes_for_selling_customers_driving_da.php

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ChuckMcM
I get the feeling that we are only in the beginning stages of this change.

Both customers (in this case law enforcement but I'm sure there will be
others) and vendors (like Tom Tom) are under economic pressure and willing to
try alternatives outside the 'usual practices.'

That creates a sort of 'invention energy' (I know, a pretty squishy term)
which enables disruption.

For a while I've noticed that sheer inertia keeps a lot of things in place.
Back at Sun I designed a replacement for the YP service called NIS+, and
because it was more secure and could do more things, as a young engineer I
figured "Folks will dump YP faster and jump on!" But customer after customer I
talked to would say "Well _we_ haven't had exactly those problems with YP, it
works for us how does this new system connect with that system?"

The answer was it connected poorly, I really had a hard time believing anyone
would want to continue using YP and so didn't spend a lot of time on thinking
about backward compatibility (beyond moving data over).

What I had learned was that system administrators (my customers) were a
cautious group. They don't change if they don't have to, and while they may
sample new things if they can do so without disruption, their high order bit
was 'hold the course.'

Later as networks got bigger and some of the features that NIS+ provided were
impossible to do any other way, adoption began to rise. Eventually lots of
networks were run using it (this was after I had left Sun, the product that
was widely adopted was the work of the NIS+ team, not me)

I had discovered for myself a way to internalize what a lot of people call the
'Value Proposition', which is the value the customer will experience by
adopting the product. This is a pair of terms, one is pain and one is
features. So you 'win' by reducing pain-points (sometimes you can have the
exact same feature set and less pain to win), and you can 'win' by adding new
features. These are the fundamental components of 'invention energy.'

As various things develop technological capabilities, those capabilities can
be combined into a wide range of possible 'features'. As various customers
develop pain (either through economic changes, or requirement changes, or
environment changes) their willingness to step away from doing things the same
way they always have also increases.

Today we have organizations that are charged with maintaining the safety of
large populations of individuals, which are constrained by budgets which
constrains their manpower and other assets. We also have a huge explosion in
personal connectivity, social graphing, and location based services. A lot of
pain, and a lot of possible technologic feature combinations. That creates a
lot of invention energy around using this data in marketable ways. Tom Tom
finds someone willing to buy their data about who is driving around when
(which no doubt they collected so they could better predict traffic patterns).
The customer in this case wants to know where folks are speeding so they can
install enforcement devices to mitigate that. Apple collects data so that they
can provide faster location fixes, but also develops an asset which can tell
competitive phone companies where customers congregate.

Bottom line is I think we will see a lot of more of this kind of thing as the
whole privacy issue plays out.

