A couple of days ago, netizens experienced a semi-apocalyptic moment, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were down for hours. What was shocking for me was that I got phone calls from very anxious people who wanted answers from me (because I'm a software engineer). While I don't work at Facebook I had to reassure my family and a number of friends that their phones weren't the problem and everything would be ok (even if I wasn't so sure 😅). It's that event that informs my post today.
TECH CREPT UPON US... LIKE A CREEP 😂
I find that events like what happened recently emphasize the subtle yet powerful way that tech has integrated itself into our everyday lives and it's worth examining some of the nuances that come with the impact of tech. I've seen the event get political, with some using the blackout to justify why big tech should be broken up, others have used it to advocate for having a backup to everything (and Telegram had a field day because of this 😂).
OTHER TECH COMPANIES THAT IMPACT US
It's important to know that Facebook isn't the only organization whose blackout would impact us, Amazon owns an organization known as AWS (Amazon Web Services), while it's not popular with consumers (like OneDrive and Google Drive is), AWS is powerful. AWS is a cloud computing platform that helps companies (that rely on the internet) scale their products around the world, AWS is the market leader in cloud computing, if they have a blackout, we'll get very close to the iron age 🤣.
Facebook(and subsidiaries, Google/Alphabet, Amazon, Netflix, and Microsoft are some of the biggest companies in the world and why they're more powerful than most companies is because all the companies I've mentioned (except Netflix) created an ecosystem. A product ecosystem is a situation where an organization becomes a one-stop solution when it comes to an industry such that each one of their products integrates so well into their other products that you're subtly encouraged to use only their products.
THE SOFTWARE SPACE IS ALL OR NOTHING
In a way, tech favours the "winner takes all" ideology as a great software product is one that can be scaled all over the planet easier than you would scale hardware products, companies that have positioned themselves at the bedrock of scaling are somewhat immortal. This post isn't aimed at scaring us, it's majorly about getting us to be more aware of our reality, and the reality of tech is that putting a cap on the growth of a tech company will create more competition at the expense of stability.
FINALLY
Now that the freemium model is a way of life in the software industry, we need organizations that have a strong cash flow to keep it going. The freemium model is basically one that prioritizes customer acquisition at the expense of profit (in the relatively short run). The question we must ask ourselves is that are we ready to pay to use Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram, Gmail, Alphabet products etc? make no mistake, while we get them for free they cost a lot of money to run ( in form of staff salaries, servers and other operating costs).