We ain't talking Cubic Zirconiums here. We ain't talking Home Shopping where you hire a couple witty models to dangle the merchandise on screen and watch the bucks roll in. It is going to give you a piece of its collective mind before it coughs up any Visa cards. Count on it. If that seems overly harsh, so is a view of commerce that reduces the role of the customer to submissively forking over the cash.
Companies dumb enough to entertain such arrogant dreams are in for a fall.
It sure isn't so we can be better targeted and packaged by slick marketeers. It's more likely because we're sick to death of the stultifying effects of mass production, mass media, mass marketing, mass everything. Not to let Gartner Group off the hot seat too quickly, let's look at their view of e-mail. The only real problem with technology is that it tends to be developed by technologists. And this kind of thinking is one of the primary proofs of the downside.