prosumerism vs. customer centricity

In customer centricity approach companies decide on the basis and customers get to choose more detailed settings of the product they are planning to purchase. This kind of approach was introduced my many companies already. The customization available on Dell’s or Apple’s websites, famous Nike trainers that can change colors, M&M platform for inscribing your girlfriend nickname on the candy and ONL’s Variomatic all bare the same quality of the possible only. Customers get to decide between the already fully pre-designed products. The promise of mass customization in therefore limited only to the pre-designed solution, which makes the array of available products more diverse than in a traditional producer-consumer relation, but still far away from truly personally suited product.
In 2003 Don Tapscott coined the term prosumerism in order to describe how “the gap between producers and consumers is blurring. Tapscott and Williams give the Second Life as an example of the community where prosumerism is leading marketing force. The participants create goods of any kind, using only their creativity in order to sell them for Linded dollars, which are worth real money. Interesting issue is, that the regulations which need to rise when any kind of commerce enters the scene, are created mostly in a bottom-up manner, pretty much in a way like Wikipedia society erases the spoilers of it’s content form their rows. Second Life not only enables, but demands the creativity of it’s users in order to maintain and grow, but it is a fully virtual environment.
Prosumerism is possible also in regard of the tangibles. Customers not only answer to the limited set of questions regarding the future product. The self-organize to create their own products. One of the examples is how prosumers hacked into the I-pods. The I-pod hack is available on the net, and while you install it, the I-pod functions are much wider – the Podzilla can be installed also and I-pod becomes the pocket Linux environment. Companies, as usual in regard of the new collective intelligence in action, can try to fight with those attempts, or can use it for their purposes.
If we can think about performative architecture as the code of behavior, then we can hack the code. If we would hack the ONL Muscle tower and reprogram it, we would act like prosumers. The question is if Muscle would then bare the quality of negotiation between real and virtual, not only possible?