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We are in the experience economy.

This Harvard Business Review article is written by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore and published in 1998.

As goods and services become commoditized, the customer experiences that companies create will matter most.

There is a book written by the same authors.

“The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage”

A few weeks ago, I bumped into a blog, where I learned the simple mantra of experience economy.

I’m not an order taker. I’m an experience maker!

This mantra reminds me that, all we are designing/creating experiences for our clients/customers.

It’s the picture that I took with iPhone in a restaurant in Seoul, Korea. The poster was on the front wall of the kitchen where waiting staffs get dishes from the kitchen. It says, “From the moment you step outside here, you should be an actor/actress.”

Korean companies are also investing on user/customer experience as a way of innovation. For example, SK Telecom has HCI (Human-Centered Innovation) group and KTF has CEM (Customer Experience Management) team.

We, D’strict helps companies create their original and unique customer experience, especially in digital display market. I will write more about this later on.

Update: I decided to change the category “User Experience” to “Customer Experience” since the latter is broader and more appropriate.

Update: I just added information about Firebug, which I found while reading a book, “Ajax on Rails“.

Today I came across with an interesting guy, Joe Hewitt, while reading an article at TechCrunch. It was interesting since Joe, the co-founder of Parakey which is now merged by Facebook, alone developed the Facebook application for iPhone. An entrepreneur gave up his vision and became a developer of an iPhone application for Facebook??? Even though what Parakey was trying to do seems a bit vague on their website, it doesn’t seem like they didn’™t know what they were doing. Parakey was a developer of Firebug, a very popular Firefox plugin providing a wealth of web development tools and Joe made huge contribution in iPhone WebDev at Google Groups. Listen to his interview at the bottom of the article at TechCrunch. You will find that these whole things just didn’t make sense. So I digged more about him. Not long after, I found his blog and also found a kind of hint why he became an iPhone application developer in his blog.

Do you remember MS IE4 totally changed our internet life? It became de-facto standard in the old days, letting a lot of Netscape users crying out since there are abundant of IE4-only websites. (Include me among them. ;-)) So there were lots of people accusing MS of using non-standard technologies. The same debate is happening again with iPhone. Some people claim that iPhone will be like MS IE4 and it will create non-standard web sites which only work with iPhone so that other mobile device users will lose accessibility to those web site. Other people argue that there are so many innovations in iPhone and others should adopt them and let the industry figure out what will be the next standard as we go.

On the Compiler (”The IPhone Is Internet Explorer 4 All Over Again“):

Ironically, some of the best performing, easy-to-use sites on a mobile device are the very 1998-looking sites that just display content in a long list. Obviously, desktop users don’t want the web to revert to 1998, which is why designers find themselves caught in the middle and forced to design two separate sites - one mobile, one normal.

Which was working until the iPhone came along and created a 3rd space - iPhone-optimized sites.

The iPhone has created a division in the mobile-optimized web which is eerily similar to the days of IE 4 when many sites simply didn’t work in Netscape.

Joe said (“The IPhone Is IE4 Again (in a good way)”):

The iPhone is going to have the same effect as IE4, but unfortunately there are a fair amount of web developers who don’™t care about progress or innovation. The dogma of web standards has blinded them, to the point where they don’t even understand how standards come to be in the first place. Do you really expect companies to refrain from releasing new products until a standards body approves, and then for all their competitors to release an identical product at the same time?? Would you like to be held to that process in your work? Companies should be encouraged to release new things, and we should standardize later.

As for the iPhone’s side, there are still so many people who cry out for native iPhone SDK for better performance. But I think that the web service model gives much more value to people beyond the performance issue and believe that Apple will maintain their choice of web service model as the iPhone development platform. I know that it’s Apple’s call to make. Until now, the answer was “NO”. Let’s see if Apple will open the Pandora’s box. Now back to Joe Hewitt, I think Joe is seeing something in iPhone, which might be different with what I am seeing but I am sure that he will agree this:

iPhone is setting the new standard in mobile web.

The world is changing and everyone is saying that. So it’s nothing more than boring and you are getting deaf whatever they say, until something hits on your head. As far as we are in the IT industry and trying to invent new technologies and innovative services, it’s hard to ignore a new generation called Net Gen. They take new things without any fear. They don’t take precedent rules. PBS has a show called FRONTLINE and they’d done a special report, ‘The Merchants of Cool‘. This show gives us some insight about today’s teens. You can watch the full program online here.

Now let’s get back to our real life and watch people around you who are under 25. If you don’t have anyone around you, go out and find them and meet them and talk to them. You will find that they are a new human race absolutely. In the “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything“, authors claimed that this new generation would change not only market place but also our working environment. It’s our job to leverage their yet-unleashed power and to drive their passion for innovation.

“Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything”

For myself, I am trying to learn WIKI and to find best ways to collaborate with Net Gen. It won’t be easy to adopt open source concept and to find my position in the new world. To be honest with you, God, it’s a hassle until now. I only hope that no more new generation will come in the future. Not again, at least not in my life, plz.