The Bloor Perspective: Apple crumbles, realistic CRM, and more sex on the net

Apple has just issued a warning that sales figures for the final three months of the year will be 'substantially' below its forecast level. This level had already been adjusted downwards and the expectation now is that revenue for the quarter will be around $1bn compared with the $1.6bn originally forecast.

The only reason Apple makes the news when it has a bad quarter is that it's traditionally seen as a competitor to the power of Intel and Microsoft. In this case, there is added news-worthiness because the revenues are so far short of initial expectations and also because it will be the company's first loss-making quarter in three years. It also follows a similar warning in the previous quarter that sent Apple's stock value plummeting. The response this time has been less extreme.

Apple has blamed the shortfall on a weak economy, internal problems and a general slowdown in computer sales. It is the last factor that is the key. Analysts have been warning of a slow down in the PC market for some time and other desktop manufacturers have also been suffering. At the end of November, Gateway reported it was lowering its expectations by $500m because sales over Thanksgiving were 30 per cent lower than forecast - a problem that has been experienced by all PC suppliers.

The problem appears to be one of saturation. The growth of the PC market has come from those desperate to have internet access, home working and so on. These people now have the systems they want so there is a natural slowing of uptake. This would have been a predictable event for most PC suppliers. However, what they seem to have missed is the fact that none of these systems are being upgraded.

The PC market has gone stagnant because it has not offered up anything new and exciting in two years. What we have works well enough and we don't feel the need to upgrade.

*Customer relationship mismanagement?*

Everywhere you look somebody is trying to turn day-to-day business operations into CRM pain so they can sell you a solution. The result is no clear CRM boundaries. Perhaps it's time to step back from the bleeding edge technology and take a pragmatic look at the CRM conundrum.

The problem, of course, is that everything we do is done with customers in mind, so it can be said all business processes need to be incorporated into a CRM solution.

At a slightly less pervasive level, perhaps it is better to say that a CRM solution needs to extend its reach to all of the customer touch points so that the business understands everything a customer does, and is able to provide a consistent and - hopefully - personalised response.

In order to achieve this we construct a customer management infrastructure. We start out by building a database that holds every customer interaction. It has to be a real-time database, just in case the customer phones the call centre immediately after sending an email. It needs to be scalable, to deal with the millions of customers we will attract and retain by having such a powerful IT solution.

The database has to be populated from information gathered at each of the customer touch points. This means a massive middleware project where the required data is gathered from call centres, email servers, web forms, ecommerce applications, web servers, supply chains, faxes, paper documents, WAP phones and just about any other electrical item imaginable.

Having gathered all of this data from the customer touch points, it is also necessary to be able to service associated demands - process an order, respond to an email, send out a brochure. This is where links into those business processes are required and the good old workflow engine comes into its own once again.

It all sounds good, doesn't it? A clever architecture that brings together the customers and the business and, as long as you can cope with the volumes, a solution that allows large parts of your business to be automated. But do your customers actually want to deal with robots? You can personalise the solution all you want, and you can develop sophisticated decision support mechanisms that can deal intelligently with customer requirements, but this can never be as flexible and responsive as a well-trained human being with the authority to make decisions.

CRM is a philosophy that needs to be prevalent all through an organisation. You cannot create it with an IT system - you can only automate bits of it.

*Sex problems*

Recently, there seems to have been an explosion in sex-related coverage. From the Sex.com court case, to peer-to-peer porn services, it's just been sex, sex, sex.

Last week Sex.com was given back to its rightful owner. The argument over who exactly owns the site has been going on for years. The main issue was a supposedly forged letter that transferred ownership of the site. As if loosing the domain name wasn't enough, Judge James Ware ordered the defendant to provide full details of the financial dealings of the site from its "transfer" in 1995. The outcome of the case will be watched with interest as it is the first to come to trial based on allegedly forged registration documents.

Over in Hong Kong the online newspaper HK Cyber has released a video clip of one of its employees having sex with a prostitute. HK Cyber claims that the clip, timed at 16 minutes, gives its reader a complete insight into the world of a prostitute and is a piece of investigative journalism. This just shows the lengths that some journalists are prepared to go in order to educate their readership.

Basing itself on the highly successful Napster P2P model, Leechnet launched itself onto the internet with the ability to exchange pornographic material via its file exchange system. The site ran into trouble almost immediately with claims that child pornography was available and while the site took prompt action the resultant publicity has prompted the site's owners, Nordic, to disable it while they investigate.

If all this talk of sex is too much for you then perhaps you should take a look at furnitureporn.com. This site offers "hot triple chair XXX chair on chair action" and is an absolute must for all lovers of draylon and fine upholstery.