Angry, I'm livid.! Bubba watson has just taken the lead at the Memorial tournament. I pick up my phone to see if he burdied the par 5 7th and I have to hit "Leaderboard" 5 or 6 times. Every time I log in, I have to again re-confirm that Bubba Watson is my favorite player. PGAtour.com feeds me scores from the Classic Tour, the Canadian Tour - they show me play by play on other players... but they will not give me what I want, what I ask for repeatedly.
I just sold an item on eBay for several thousand dollars - best ever. Do you think I can find my messages? On my Win7 machine, I've learned never to load the eBay home page - which perpetually loads images of items which I already bought on eBay. I have been on eBay since 1997, I know how to find what I'm looking for, I've bought hundreds of items. But I can no longer go there. I've even gone so far as to load the mobile site on my desktop - just to prevent it killing my computer.
Google, to its credit, has not junked up the screen... but on every tech search I try, I'm forced to restrict the time frame to one month or one year. Do you think all-powerful Google could add the time frame button to their completely empty page - given that I use it several times each day? Nope, they must not be paying attention.
What does this have to do with BIG Data. I'll tell you. Companies are consumed with trying to predict my behavior and especially what I might be interested in buying next. And they are neglecting and annoying me by ignoring what I try to shout to them (repeatedly).
Lets illustrate the challenge in predicting purchases. Think back to the last time you visited a big box store. Perhaps we talked outside and made a list of all the things you intended to buy on your visit. What are the odds that when you come out, you have exactly that list of items, no more, no less? In my case it is no better than 100 to 1. So if you, knowing all you know about you, cannot predict your own behavior, 5 minutes in advance. What chance does some computer have, merely looking at your lifetime tweets?
BIG Data is capturing the attention - and the result is anger - your customers are angry - they hate your new "Predictive" site. They hate that for weeks they see ads for items they already bought or weren't really interested in. But most of all, they hate that you took away their time and access so you could piddle with global data feeds. Give your customers what they want - but quit trying to out-guess them.
