Problem #4: Control of software and hardware platforms by the IT giants

Corporations control the software and hardware platforms and are committed to promoting their products. How can a community of platform users counter that? How can the standard established by the platform become recognizable and accepted?

The community has a powerful resource – the right to monetize its content.

Content is the asset that we seek in the corporate product space. Corporations create and promote their platforms and services and maintain their functioning. They lead the users there to create content, which is then used by corporations to make profits.

The users’ chance to use the services for free in exchange for corporations monetizing the content created by the users –this formula is the foundation of most corporate projects.

• The value of Youtube.com for users is the content that users create and publish. The leading position ensures the attraction and concentration of interests of various user groups – content suppliers, viewers and advertisers.

• The value of Instagram.com is in your friends, who share the space with you, and with whom you’re sharing your life stories. They are the reason you are there.

• The value of Yelp.com is in the chance to find the best cafes and restaurants based on reviews of users from around the world, which we perceive as objective rather than promotional.

IT giants today are creating and buying services that we use every day, they are consolidating and monopolizing the market.

Projects that were still independent recently, such as Skype, LinkedIn, Instagram, WhatsApp, YouTube, have been bought out and are now managed by corporations. Still recently GitHub was the largest independent platform for storing and jointly working on programming code, which united 27 million developers from around the world, and today GitHub is property of Microsoft.

By using the services that corporations offer, we agree with the rules that they set. We can essentially stop using these services if we don’t agree with the rules, but can we really do without these services in the modern world? Do we still have a choice?

Can we give up the need to search online for the information we need? Can we give up communicating with our friends, loved ones and colleagues? Can we give up the need to find a suitable job?

The benefits that these services manage to provide cannot be underestimated. However, in the digital era any global service is a bit more than just a product. It starts out discreetly at first, and then begins to manage and influence our lives in an increasingly apparent manner. A vivid example are the Facebook scandals and the obvious role of the corporation’s user data management standards in the alteration of the vector of entire global politics for the next several years.

Corporate services have begun to replace certain state institutions or functionally merge with them. An interesting example is provided by the social rating system in China, which was established and developed with the support of national corporations and the Communist party. This system monitors and automatically rates the actions of citizens according to a number of preset criteria. The rating increases or decreases based on hundreds of various parameters – from complying with traffic regulations to facts of criticizing the state. In the absence of the right of the citizens to influence these parameters, the state has obtained a unilateral opportunity to manage the society’s behavior more efficiently.

Contemporary societies are based on the presence of efficient feedback mechanisms in relation to the managing structures, be it the state or the corporations.

The difference between the corporate and the state structure is that the profit maximization principle is always at the core of a commercial organization. Will corporate management ethics prevail over profit maximization goals? The example of the respectable Volkswagen AG, which installed automobile software that falsified data on harmful emissions to the atmosphere, understating their volumes dozens of times in order to efficiently sell the autos on European and US markets, testifies to the contrary.

Is it important to retain control in the new global digital world, where a significant share of daily needs is satisfied by corporate services, whose actions cannot be controlled effectively or directly?

Spheroid Universe is proposing an approach where the users, rather than the developers of product platforms, are the subjects with legal rights to accounts, who determine the rules of their content’s monetization. Users are the owners of the resource that allows to obtain profits, thus, they retain the influence over the decisions and politics of the teams that depend on content monetization.

This is the basis for the restructuring of the market from the dominant state of ‘software supplier market,’ where users are in an apparently dependent state, to ‘product user market’ state.

Corporations can offer their services to the community within this model. In our case, these can be any advertising publishing services, AR object storage services, or any others. Any developer can offer his solution to the community, and the users will be able to choose the one to use.

**What is the basis for accepting platform products as one of the industry standards? **

At the time when the number of platform users reaches a critical value, the platform will become a subject of the digital space. IT giants will be interested in interacting with the platform, creating their monetization chains and models in this space, therefore, they will begin supporting and developing platform standards.

Summary:

A startup that’s aiming for global leadership should rethink and transform itself. The approach based on the idea of a project that concentrates resources within itself, and is subsequently transformed into a corporation, does not correspond to the demands and spirit of the time. The basis for global success today and tomorrow are decentralization and efficient management, founded on market principles with a consensus of the participants, quick and efficient feedback, inclusion of the maximum number of participants in the results (revenue) of the project’s economic activity.