Chris Messina

Conversational commerce is still in its very early days so we're not sure whether it would work or not. Conversational commerce does, however, have certain benefits over the traditional web experience. Because of the ongoing interaction with the user, the service will be able to offer extreme personalisation, and shorten the purchase flow radically. Today on the web, we have created a destination mentality, where brands convince consumers to go to their site and stay there. Conversational or social commerce is more like the real world were you walk past something, you do something else and then perhaps you chat about it and even purchase it later. The real world is more chaotic and conversational commerce havs the potential to reflect that better than the traditional web. That being said, we do not believe the future of conversational commerce is a simple chatbot reflecting the old-school terminal. As you mentioned, pure text is not great for discoverability and comparisons. We believe the future of conversational commerce belongs to the hybrid interface, bringing that GUI and command line paradigms together. One final note is that as AI gets more and more sophisticated, the need for browsing through the endless products on Pinterest might disappear, as the service will be able to offer recommendations that fit exactly to the users’ needs. The service could present three products based on user needs, allowing the user to make a more informed decision. More reading: -…

> reaching the point where you never need to work again? You don't want to reach that point. You want to stay below that point, because what brings satisfaction and happiness in life is something called the "power process". The Unabomber explained it well [1]. The Unabomber unfortunately used bad methods to spread his ideas, but the ideas themselves were good. [1] https://medium.com/chris-messina/surrogate-activities-the-power-proces…

Many do not. There is a theory of something called the Power Process, which states that for people to be happy, they need goals which require effort, and need to achieve at least some of those goals. The lack of meaningful goals which require effort in the first world may be responsible for much of the depression, suicide, and other issues that plague us today. I found this Medium post which quotes the relevant parts: https://medium.com/chris-messina/surrogate-activities-the-power-proces…

"You seem to be confusing Apple Retail for Apple as a whole." You seem to misunderstand what Apple is actually selling, what 'Marketing' is and why a 'Designer' is the #2 guy at the company (or was). They are a 'luxury brand' in the 'consumer products' segment - they are not a technology company. [1] "I have always thought of Apple as a luxury brand," said Greg Furman, founder and chairman of The Luxury Marketing Council." "Apple is not a technology company" [2] The company stopped being a tech company over 10 years ago, and this might give you a hint as to why MacBooks have languished as they have moved onto wearables, and toying with cars. [1] http://www.cnbc.com/2013/10/15/apple-is-a-luxury-brand-not-a-tech-comp… [2] https://medium.com/chris-messina/silicon-valley-is-all-wrong-about-the…

Everyone read this [0] and now think it's The Next Big Thing™. That and Slack, I guess? I don't get it either. The nice thing about not typing out requests ("it's not a command-line interface," they all say) to perform virtual actions is that you don't have to type out requests to perform virtual actions. And having different apps and websites for different purposes gives you choice, privacy, and control over who you interact with online. You don't have to get locked in to a platform and hope they never do anything nefarious or user-unfriendly for fear there's nowhere else to turn. But I guess we're the minority. [0] https://medium.com/chris-messina/2016-will-be-the-year-of-conversation…

In some of his better known work, a then little known mathematician wrote about this sort of behaviour, the deep underlying societal causes, and proposed explosive solutions to the problem: " We use the term “surrogate activity” to designate an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward, or let us say, merely for the sake of the “fulfillment” that they get from pursuing the goal. Here is a rule of thumb for the identification of surrogate activities. Given a person who devotes much time and energy to the pursuit of goal X, ask yourself this: If he had to devote most of his time and energy to satisfying his biological needs, and if that effort required him to use his physical and mental faculties in a varied and interesting way, would he feel seriously deprived because he did not attain goal X? If the answer is no, then the person’s pursuit of goal X is a surrogate activity." https://medium.com/chris-messina/surrogate-activities-the-power-proces…