Metaverse – The Return of the Undead
There. Is. No. Metaverse. I am sorry to be a party pooper but read me out. It doesn’t exist. At least not yet. And not for quite some years to come. I am talking of a decade or more. Perhaps not ever. And whence it comes, it probably looks different from what we see now, and we will likely call it by a different name. Does this statement surprise you? I mean, many people, companies and investors are looking at metaverse as being the next big thing. Crunchbase already in November 2021 reported more than $10.6bn being investedinto metaverse related startups. According to a Galaxy report quoted by Institutional Investor, crypto and blockchain startups alone collected more than $32bn in 2021. Microsoft just invested a whopping $70bn in Activision Blizzard, which is clearly a metaverse play. So much money cannot be wrong, right? Google trends also suggests that there is quite some interest in these topics that came up quite recently and quite suddenly, which means that the trend has reached the masses. Figure 1: Google Trends NFT (blue) & Metaverse (red) 01/01/20 – 02/07/22 Last, but not least, “Metaverse” is not a new concept, as it exists since at least 1998 – yes, I am talking about Half Life, the first person shooter game that is often credited with providing a highly immersive world as a first of kind. The first usage of the term itself is credited to Neal Stephenson, who used it in his novel “Snow Crash”. Still: It. Does. Not. Exist. The biggest evidence for there not being a metaverse is that everyone (and their dog) is building one or even claiming...
Your ultimate 2021 hit list of most read articles
It is this time of the year and I want to extend a heart-felt Thank You! to all my readers who honour me by investing your time into reading my posts, sharing and commenting on them. Thank You! Below is the list of the top 10 posts read by you in 2021 #10: How to avoid the looming CRM crisis #9: The Dirty Dozen of 2021 Trends (maybe I should revise this one for 2022?) #8: CRMKonvo – Freshworks on Platform, CRM and useful AI #7: Outlaw Spirit – Lessons from The Zoho Analyst Day 2021 #6: How to orchestrate customer journeys in real time at scale #5: Digitization, Digitalization, Digital Transformation – A Stake in the Ground #4: With Oracle Fusion Marketing into the Future of CRM? #3: Together, Zoom and Five9 shape a new market (well, in the light of this merger having failed … they could have shaped a market. Still, a very readable one) #2: Nimble strengthens its ability to be where the user is #1: Ecosystem Play, One Game at a Time Obviously, I do not know yet in detail what I am going to write about in 2022. however, I strive to make it as valuable for you as this year – at least Bonne...
How autonomous automation is the future
During the past weeks I had a couple of observations and conversations that lead me to thinking that sometimes software vendors underestimate the power that their machine learning based systems could have to improve the lives and experiences of employees and customers. From various vendors in various lines of business, from process mining and automation via application performance monitoring to vendors of conversational AI and pretty much everything in between I hear something like the following: “Our machine learning based system continuously analyses the process/interactions and detects anomalies. From there on it identifies the patterns and can make suggestions how these anomalies can be avoided or resolved.” Of course, this is paraphrased, but you get the meaning. Here are some examples. A real life scenario that I once encountered is as follows: A global B2B e-commerce solution using synchronous pricing is set up in a template approach. It is using one single ERP system for pricing. This is a pretty common B2B scenario, as it is often not feasible to replicate all prices to the e-commerce system, due to the sheer amount of product – customer combinations that are possible. In this scenario, adding a product to the shopping cart involves multiple calls from the e-commerce solution to the ERP system to establish the price. The pilot country site is close to the country that hosts the ERP system. Implementation of the e-commerce solution happened in the country that hosts the ERP system for all e-commerce sites. Deployment into the target countries can happen only after the testing phase, which is clearly suboptimal. Adding a product to the cart...