In business school one of the most iconic examples of the failure of a technologically superior product at the hand of a technologically inferior product cited is that of the Philips Video 2000 facing Sony’s VHS system. The reason cited: that Sony was smart enough to make sure thousands of video’s were available for it’s inferior system where Philips paid less attention to distribution and more to technological development. Consequently the VHS system reigned for a decade and the Video 2000 withered away. The one system starts from a top down engineer’s mindset, the other from a bottom up user interest approach.
Philips Video 2000
Similarly social media generate huge amounts of content: to each his own, where websites who don’t cater for user interaction have less content and fail to cater to each individual’s taste.
Sony's Hit The VHS System
Youtube has replaced VHS and it’s succesories. Does it stop here? No there is a continuous movement of consumer empowerment going on. This empowerment is technologically driven while making the role of the engineer subservient to the consumer’s needs as web technology matures. The marketeer and the strategist steer websites into the role of enabler based on customer input.
Youtube: userdriven content
The next step is going to give users even more control over the medium by giving them more and more access to the code through user friendly interfaces.
The first step being the WYSIWYG programs allowing graphical interaction with a program that encodes your graphical input for you, generating a site with ease: we have already moved light years ahead since.
This becomes most apparent in the area of social media.
First of all users can generate and customize their pages within social media platforms;
Second: they can easily start activities on these platforms from blogs to generating their own social network site;
Third: adding applications, customizing and even creating them is becoming easier every day;
But here’s where it get’s realy interesting: these platforms are so open that users can integrate them with all their other social media and thus integrate their online presence in one or more locations through such technologies as the Open Social language.
Sites that are closed of from such integrative technologies might prove to be the next Philips Video 2000 systems of their day.
We predict that integration through increasingly userfriendly interfaces will be the trend. People dazzle us with terms such as web 2.0 and even web 3.0, but this aspect will be key.
To explore these possibilities further you might want to follow the experiment we are conducting with a user generated site at:
http://www.thehob.biz
The site was generated without any hard programming skills and will be more and more integrated with other social media. Thus creating a kind of “super user” generated platform while enabling IT’S users to benefit. Although it has been in existence for only two months, already other “super users” are replicating parts of it’s functionality and many enjoy it as a platform for business interaction and personal friendships
