Has anyone asked you recently about the past, present, and future of Customer Data Platforms? No? That's odd; people ask me those questions

all the time. Here are my current answers.

It’s eleven years since the term “customer data platform” appeared in 2013. What stages has it gone through over that time?

The first stage was just to recognize that CDP was a separate category of software. What was new about CDP was that it was packaged software that was building a customer database. Before then, customer databases were custom projects, like a data warehouse, and the only packaged marketing software was applications like campaign management systems or predictive modeling tools. The earliest CDPs actually bundled the database building capability with an application.…