Facebook’s rapid consolidation of digital brands chimes with SuperOne’s ambitions
Facebook is like an out-of-control beanstalk on a nitrogen-rich diet. Its growth seems to defy the parameters of normality and, in common with a number of tech giants, people have given up speculating on where the ceiling is. Will its growth curve ever flatten out?
First of all, if you’re one of those smug people who say: “well I don’t use Facebook anymore because blah-blah-blah Russians and blah-blah-blah adverts and blahblah-blah data” then really you should take a closer look at your online activity. Because Facebook is not just Facebook any more. It is quite a lot more.
It is WhatsApp and Instagram too. It also owns the VR equipment provider Oculus and it also has Messenger, which you might think of as a component of Facebook itself, but it’s really a stand-alone service and app. So even if you are an ex-Facebook user, you are probably still contributing to the company’s overall network growth in one way or another.
Part of the long-term vision of SuperOne is to build a single app that takes care of a number of requirements, eliminating the need for multiple apps on your phone. Opportunities to buy travel products, trade crypto, and interact digitally could all exist within SuperOne and alongside the primary gaming platform. Because if there’s one thing that’s pretty obvious about the digital space (from observing what Facebook and others do) it’s this: consolidation and organic growth are generally allowed to prosper.
And Facebook in many ways is content to pull the wool over people’s eyes. It’s actively pursuing a policy that allows its apps to blend together more seamlessly behind the scenes. Facebook’s products may stay separate legal entities, but over time they are beginning to interact more closely than before.
For example, Facebook lets people use Instagram to send a photo to someone using Messenger. And you can do exactly the same in the opposite direction — use Messenger to post a photo on Instagram. Industry insiders reckon it’s only a matter of time before you’ll be able to text a friend who uses only WhatsApp from your Messenger account.
The ongoing process of linking these apps together has potential benefits for third-party businesses. (It’s already possible to post identical content to both Facebook and Instagram just by ticking a box, for example.)
Tech giants are always one step ahead of regulators
But the more Facebook operates as a single ecosystem rather than a solar system of independent apps, the harder it becomes for administrations to break up Facebook and the tougher it might become for rivals to compete. This goes to show just how hard it is to rein in the power of superstar companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon.
It takes a long time to enforce small changes, and once they go through the story has advanced; there are bigger sharks to catch. The legality around the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp has perhaps not been challenged vociferously enough. Anything that stifles competition, that monopolizes an industry is counter-productive in terms of stimulating original thought and allowing small enterprises in the digital sector to thrive.
There is a history of big tech names bundling products and data together to build a sort of invincible armor. Just look at Google: it hired some very smart people who found ways of joining together separate parts of its internet advertising business into a largely unified system that now makes it difficult for anyone to buy or sell ads online without going through Google.
Microsoft once tried to force anyone with a Windows computer to use Internet Explorer, but failed. And this, coincidentally, paved the way for Google to gain extra leverage through rolling out the superior browser, Chrome. So as the tech sector grows, and provides the only real success story in the era of pandemic uncertainty, that growth is largely enabled by the exponential success of the brands we already know about.
Yet there are two positives for SuperOne amidst all this: the first is that we are a long way from reaching the end-point of where people’s appetite for more tech “stuff” ends. And as we have seen with Facebook, SuperOne can be as ambitious as it likes because the digital sector is not exactly renowned for putting the brakes on successful brands.