Well, it’s been only a day but have already had some interesting reactions to my new line of work. The general sentiment seems to be “interesting, but is there demand for it”? Well, there will be demand if there’s value to be had, and I fundamentally believe this to be the case.

Not only are we seeing companies like IBM, Cisco and Microsoft launch enterprise class software products to address this market but they are using the tools themselves.

Most recently IBM has changed the mail recall function of their Notes 8 product due to comments on Ed Brill’s blog about the feature. This ability to involve customers in discussions about products ensures that the finished article is closely aligned to their needs and expectations. Companies who engage with their customers in this way will end up with far superior customer satisfaction and loyalty and enjoy the lower cost of getting products right first time round, and not have to rely on the expensive process of modifying their products after the event due to customer feedback/fury. Of course software companies have been trialling products and releasing betas since the beginning of the industry, but the sheer volume of feedback that tools such as blogs now present make the process far more accurate, valuable and cheap. It costs nothing for Ed to post a thought around features on his blog and watch the response compared to building a version of the product, sending it out to customers and running formal feedback programs. It is also immeasurably quicker!

Maybe Microsoft should have done something similar before introducing User Access Control in Vista (see one of the many adverse reactions here) or Facebook (ironically) before introducing news feeds?

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