"In 40 years the world went from 5,000 stand-alone computers, many of which we owned, to 420 million computers, many of which are better than ours."
—Gen. Mike Hayden, director of the National Security Agency

THOSE CRAZY CEOS, WHAT'LL THEY DO NEXT?

From a joke site called SatireWire.com:

Unwilling to wait for their eventual indictments, the 10,000 remaining CEOs of public U.S. companies made a break for it yesterday, heading for the Mexican border and writing it off as a marketing expense.

“They came into my home, made me pay for my own TV, then double-booked the revenue,” said Rachel Sanchez of Las Cruces, just north of El Paso, Texas. “Right in front of my daughters.”

Calling themselves the CEOnistas, the outlaws bought the city of Waco, transferred its underperforming areas to a private partnership, and sent a bill to California for $4.5 billion.

While some stragglers are believed to have crossed into Mexico, police said the bulk of the CEOnistas have holed themselves up at the Alamo, where their battle cry is, “You’ll never audit me alive!”

HOW WORLDCOM MADE DONKEYS OF INVESTORS

WorldCom Inc. (www.worldcom.com) gallows humor is proliferating on the Web. This one comes from a friend in Massachusetts:

A city boy, Kenny, moved to the country and bought a donkey for $100 from a farmer, who agreed to deliver the donkey the next day. Unfortunately, the beast died overnight.

Kenny asked for his money back, but the farmer said he’d spent it already.

“O.K.,” said Kenney, “but give me the donkey’s body.”

A month later the farmer met up with Kenny and asked, “What happened with that donkey?”

Kenny: “I raffled him off. I sold 500 tickets at two dollars a piece, so I received $1,000.”

“Didn’t anyone complain that the donkey was dead?”

“Just the guy who won,” Kenny said. “So I gave him his two dollars back.”

Kenny grew up to become the CEO of WorldCom.

PHONE FACTS

About 600,000 mobile phones get dropped into toilets in the U.K. every year, according to a 2002 study by a market-research firm. An additional 400,000 fall into pints of beer or other drinks, and 200,000 are tossed into washing machines. “This high level of enforced churn ensures that the market for replacement mobile-phone handsets will remain buoyant,” wrote the British firm, Continental Research (www.continentalresearch.com), perhaps with tongue in cheek. Maybe the firm also is trying to tell us that there is a huge market for mobile phones that float.

In a result that seems somehow related to all those phones that wind up in pints of beer, a survey found that 59% of mobile-phone users in the U.K. admit to having sent offensive or inappropriate text messages while inebriated. The survey, by Finnish wireless services provider Sonera Zed (www.zed.com), found that drunken users sent rude messages, sent messages about private or personal matters to the wrong recipient, or sent messages to ex-boyfriends or ex-girlfriends that they wouldn’t have sent when sober. One-third of respondents admitted to waking up the next day to find a stranger’s phone number newly stored in their cellphones.

HE'LL GLADLY PAY FOR THE EXTRA MINUTES

Last July, 26-year-old Leonardo Diaz got one of those solicitation calls that most of us hang up on. It saved his life.

Maria-Angelica Triana, a service representative with BellSouth Corp. (www.bellsouth.com) was calling to see if she could sell him some more time on his prepaid cellular account. Diaz had something more urgent to discuss: He had become disoriented while climbing one of Colombia’s highest peaks and desperately needed help.

He had started off to climb the Nevado del Ruiz, a 17,600-foot mountain, carrying only chocolates, a bottle of brandy, and his prepaid cellphone, which had run out of minutes. At about 13,000 feet, the lack of oxygen had clouded his judgment. He was beginning to suffer from hypothermia, and a second nightfall was fast approaching.

BellSouth summoned help, but search efforts had to be postponed because of darkness. Through the night, Triana and colleagues took turns calling Diaz every 20 minutes to keep him alert. Late that night, a group of French climbers who were already on the mountain found Diaz and stayed with him until a rescue team arrived the following morning.

SPEAK UP! I CAN'T SEE YOU

Now if Diaz had been stranded on Japan’s Mount Fuji, instead, he also could have shown his would-be rescuers his blue lips. For, in Japan, handset makers have been installing miniature cameras on their mobile phones, along with full-color screens, since early 2000. The devices are especially popular at sports events.

Japan’s photo-phone shipments are expected to nearly quadruple by March to 23 million, according to market researcher Yano Research Institute Ltd. (www.yanoresearch.com). By March, one in three handsets in use in Japan is expected to have a camera attached.

DON'T FENCE ME IN

In their efforts to snuggle up to customers, corporations may try to get too close, causing buyers to look for an escape route. To discuss the right way to build intimacy, Context Managing Editor Pegeen Hopkins chatted with Barbara Bund, a senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

The short answer, Bund says, is that companies have to be able to distinguish among customers, so that customers who want stronger commitments get more attention and perks and those who want less get less. The long answer follows.

CONTEXT: Companies often talk these days about wanting to know their customers more intimately. Have they been able to?

BARBARA BUND: Customers don’t always want as much closeness as sellers do. Marketers talk about customer loyalty and keeping customers locked in. Customers complain about being held captive.

Some customers really do form long-term relationships with sellers. Many don’t, however.

CONTEXT: How do you know who has the potential to be loyal?

BUND: That’s tricky. Many customers say they are loyal and therefore deserve lots of attention. Yet most companies will find that their customers actually exhibit a variety of levels of loyalty.

Still, companies can identify indicators for loyalty. One is whether a customer is willing to get the supplier involved in processes that would make it harder for it to switch brands.

Companies should experiment. If a client is identified as having relationship potential, there should be a goal for what is going to happen with the customer in some specified time frame, such as six months. If the goal isn’t met, the customer should be shifted back to the prior level of service.

CONTEXT: What companies are good at building relationships?

BUND: Dell Computer Corp [www.dell.com] does a good job by using different procedures for what I call relationship customers, who tend to be loyal, than it uses for what I call transaction customers, who tend to view each purchase separately. For relationship buyers, Dell will build customized Web sites, ship computers with software already loaded, or even put tags on the products matching up to a customer’s physical asset-management system. Dell is glad to have transaction customers, but it doesn’t invest as many resources in them.

Vanguard Group Inc., the mutual-fund company [www.vanguard.com], has different levels of service depending on how much money people invest there. Most people understand that a smaller account can’t demand as much service as a larger account. It can be helpful, though, to have an open conversation with customers about the different service levels available.

CONTEXT: How should companies approach customer-relationship management?

BUND: I get nervous when the first thing I hear from people is, “I’ve got this CRM program.” I get much more comfortable when I hear, “Here are our different types of customers. Here is what we provide them. Here is how our strategy differs for different types of customers. Here is the information we keep to make all that work.”

Too often lately, technology has driven CRM efforts. The question is not what the technology is, but rather what kinds of relationships you want with your customers and what kinds of relationships your customers want with you. Until those questions have been answered at a high corporate level, CRM seems to me to be wasteful, if not harmful.