If a company is really going to gain the trust of customers, it must be prepared to offer the products and services of other companies, even of competitors.
– John Hagel, Restoring the Power of Brands, July 12, 2005
Worth remembering, though especially difficult for original content/product companies to trust and enact.
Of course, he also throws out what is becoming a hoary chestnut: “No matter how powerful our technology becomes, it will never give us more than 24 hours within the day.” But I repeat it because I believe in it.
As an aside, hoary is in the dictionary, but not yet in Wikipedia. That’s appropriate, but worth noting that when I decided to sharpen my fuzzy internal definition of the word, I thought of three sources, in this order: Google (define:), Wikipedia, and then Dictionary.com. Mindshare, people.