[iDC] Will you delete your Feedburner account?

[Geert Lovink]

> Changing the rules is easy. Changing Entrepreneurs is easy too: simply 
> change the customer and the entrepreneur will follow. That is what 
> Entrepreneurs do: satisfy customer demand. Can you change customer 
> demand?

Throughout your postings you confuse users and customers. That's the 
core problem since 1992 when the Internet opened up. Users are an odd 
new category, half producers, half consumers, or some mix of them. They 
do not go to MySpace to buy a product. We all know that. What's not 
understood here is the element of the social. Of couse the social can 
be commodified, but as a model of explanation what's actually happening 
online the economic reading is a poor one.

And sorry about the confusion between IPO and sell out. With sell out I 
mean selling your company and getting out completely after a while. 
This is what mostly happens. Of course Microsoft, Google and Yahoo have 
gone public but the founders did not sell out and left the scene. Quite 
the opposite, they are still in control.

> Conclusion: what we are doing here is debating the rules of the game. 
> And that is great. Rules should be challenged, broken en revised all 
> the time. My idea is that you don't need extra rules (not less either, 
> don't get me wrong) to protect the customer. They don't want it and 
> they don't need it. They have the biggest stick to hit any business 
> with: They can simply choose not to be a customer anymore.
>
> This is something that every business-owner, small or big, fears the 
> most.

And that's why it is so good to call for a feedburner boycot all 
together. Let's punish the founders for selling their company to 
Google. Many feel that Google is rapidly becoming way too powerful. Why 
support yet another monopolist? Why can't feeburner thrive as an 
idendepent company? The very logic that there is some natural law that 
they have to sell out or IPO NOW has to be challenged. This hasty 
behaviour is silly. The notion that there was no time has been the most 
ridicuous element of the dotcom religion. If you want to criticize 
'hype' you have to start with criticizing the very notion that 
companies 'have no time'. This only creates imaginary frontiers that do 
not exist.

Geert