How Semantics Could NEVER Help the Big Three

I love ICT, I'm donkey deep in it and have a ball, but when I see this kind of thing I just want to throw up. How Semantics Could Help the Big Three.

If only U.S. automakers had listened to customer sentiment in online forums and blogs -- using the power of semantic technology -- they might not be in the fix they're in today.

Semantic software vendor Expert System, which provides technology to discover, classify, and interpret unstructured text information, recently announced study results about whether semantic analysis of consumer opinions online could have predicted, or helped prevent, the plunging sales of the U.S. autos.

The answer is: Yes. “The most striking thing is that people were trying to tell them something,” says CEO J. Brooke Aker. While the blame for overall decline and events such as Chrysler’s and GM's bankruptcies lies in many areas, including the global economic crisis, Expert contends that qualitative consumer sentiment analysis could have helped the Big Three auto companies identify challenges and consumer preferences before losing customer loyalty.

“Technology is begging to be used so that their voices can be heard,” Aker says. “This was a very drastic case, but having a constant stream of material [from customers] gives you information you could use to decide what could be done.”

NOT. THE. DAMNED. POINT.

Do these guys imagine for a single second that the big 3 automakers didn't get plenty of feedback, criticism, death threats and god knows what from their customers? Didn't they see their sales slipping and market share sliding year after year? Didn't they have endless focus groups and market research studies that would have told them already anything that the semantic analysis could tell them?

They could have used that information at any time in the last 20 years to turn around their company but there were two huge barriers to taking any effective action at all; vested interest and current year profits.

To take any action that would see the company transition to a new and extended, if not sustainable, model would have cut present profits further and upset the shareholders even more, and it would have trimmed those bonuses that they had so carefully gerrymandered into their contracts.

The issue is that these people decided to drive their company into the ground and suck it dry on the way and GM and the rest have reached the end of the corporate model.

1. Create and organisation to make doing what you are doing more effective and profitable
2. The organisation's purpose becomes its own survival
3. The organisation is captured by its management and run for their enrichment at the expense of the long term interests of the shareholders and the survival of the company itself.

Can't you just see those meetings where the CEO proposes a 'package' for himself that contains 'incentives' that everyone with a brain around the table knows will damage the long term future of the company? But since they are all in the same boat, nobody says anything, the package is agreed and they move on to the next tier of management who are vested in the same perverse incentives.

GM and Chrysler just got to the end of that road, as most big corporations will.