Comments on: Mike Neuenschwander on Limited Liability Personas: Intro

By: Adam

Adam — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 01:36:16 +0000

Frank,
That’s a really good point about democratization. I focused on a slightly different aspect, and overlapped a little with your comment without meaning to.
Dave,
Absolutely! I was thinking about that. D you have a question we should ask? Also, have you read Gelfman’s work on The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life?

By: Dave Birch

Dave Birch — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 16:53:49 +0000

I agree this is some really interesting stuff and I’d like to toss in another factor: brand. The persona I choose for World of Warcraft and the persona I choose for online banking might (underwritten/signed/issued/whatever) by quite different brands and, in time, you could imagine different brands beginning to “mean” different things in different subgroups. Time for some more thinking about this I think.

By: Frank Hecker

Frank Hecker — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 12:56:16 +0000

At first glance (reading this blog post and a couple of the Burton Group posts) this is a really interesting idea. It seems to be a natural extension of what many wealthy people have done for years, namely have “personal corporations” that they use to buy houses, pay their various bills and expenses, and otherwise transact their personal business.
A big theme in economic growth is taking stuff affordable only by the wealthy and driving the costs down to where it can be sold to a mass market. If something equivalent to traditional personal corporations could be done at a cost low enough to make it attractive to the average person then IMO this could be a big business opportunity for a smart entrepreneur.

By: Iang

Iang — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 08:23:15 +0000

As an example of symmetry in relationships, I recently contrasted two approaches to Arbitration on my blog (see link, sorry about the lack of https). In one, a company used arbitration in an asymmetrical fashion, and this was struck down by a USA court (and they’ve since redesigned their agreement). In another, CAcert uses arbitration as a peer, and places itself before the Arbitrator as much as any of the community members.
CAcert doesn’t have a commercial mission, but the other company does. It is an interesting question as to what would encourage a profit-making business to give up a power it initially holds, when it might impact future profits. The answer isn’t easily found, so I am definately interested to see how far your can get with you goal of symmetry.
Disclosure: I work with the CAcert community as auditor, so I’m mildly conflicted in writing about them.