I quite liked Doc Searls’ piece in the Wall Street Journal on the market of one – or as he calls it, power to individuals to broadcast their intents until they find a vendor that matches what they want, not what the vendor wants to sell:

Since the Industrial Revolution, the only way a company could scale up in productivity and profit was by treating customers as populations rather than as individuals—and by treating employees as positions on an organization chart rather than as unique sources of talent and ideas. Anything that stood in the way of larger scale tended to be dismissed.

The Internet has challenged that system by giving individuals the same power. Any of us can now communicate with anybody else, anywhere in the world, at costs close to zero. We can set up our own websites. We can produce, publish, syndicate and do other influential things, with global reach. Each of us can be valuable as unique individuals and not only as members of groups.

According to David Weinberger, the caption “Customer as God” was not something Searls wrote himself – it does look a bit over the top. But customer power is increasingly on the rise – though it has come much longer in the USA than it has in Europe, no matter how much legislation EU has as opposed to the USA. The wonders of competition and falling transaction costs…