12/12/2020

The archive contains older posts which may no longer reflect my current views.

# Ten years ago (yes, a whole decade) I asked "Are social platforms the next Microsoft?":

"Can we envisage a time when a social platform is large enough to attract the attention of the authorities for anti-competitive behaviour?"

Facebook and Twitter had already been changing the game, buying smaller companies whose products made them better, or stealing their ideas.

Back in 2010, social networks weren't the powerhouses they are now, so ingrained in our psyches and societies, but the writing was on the wall, it was obvious they were already vying for a much larger slice of the pie.

Om Malik writes "Going back to Microsoft, the company whose troubles with the government have many similarities with Facebook, I would argue that they are doing what they have always done – using their market size as a moat and expanding into new markets. We don’t realize it just yet." He's referring to their acquisition of LinkedIn and GitHub, more ways of acquiring data and leveraging this to acquire dominance in areas that may not have been obvious previously.

Social has changed almost all games.

It doesn't stop there. Amazon continues its march to become the marketplace for everything, Google is always bin the mix, Apple continues its march into services, and you have to wonder where Salesforce is heading after the acquisition of Slack.

You can't blame these organisations for wanting to grow, expand, become more profitable, but the manner in which it is happening leaves cause for concern.

I finished that post ten years ago with a two part question. The first, "Will we see complaints from one service against another" has been largely nullified by the purchasing power of the big guns, although there have still been instances such as Snapchat's complaint about Instagram (and now everyone) stealing the Stories feature. Yet, that was expected, as I also wrote in 2012:

"Once a feature exists on one platform the consumer comes to expect it no matter what they are using. Popular functionality becomes the de facto industry standard by virtue of demand - if your platform doesn't have it your customers will want to know why."

The second half of that closing question was by far the more pertinent: "will complaints come from outside the social web as other areas start to feel threatened as social platforms look for new areas to expand to beyond their traditional domains?"