After being acquired by eBay for US$2.6 billion ($4.3b) in 2005, the online shopping platform revealed a couple of years later that it had overvalued it. Alas, it would go on to sell it to Microsoft in 2011 for US$8.5b.
It was the same year Zoom was founded and when the world plunged into Covid lockdowns in 2020, millions moved to the platform. By April that year, Zoom had 300 million daily meeting participants worldwide. Six months before that, it was only 10 million.
Skype hasn’t been the only platform to feel the effects of human online migration. MySpace users flocked to Facebook, then flocked to Instagram. Twitter became X and Instagram’s answer to it amassed two million users in two hours. Online chat switched from AOL to MSN, Bebo and Facebook Messenger. BlackBerry BBM users switched over to Apple iMessages.
Victoria University of Wellington professor of information systems, Alex Richter, told The Front Page there are endless examples of these kinds of shifts.
“For Skype, it was simplicity. For MySpace, it was the activity streams that they didn’t have ... They were really slow to adopt this [type of feature] that Facebook and Twitter had. This is a core social feature and was, for many users, as they wanted to connect with others. They wanted to have this constant stream of awareness, what’s going on for others.
“It turns out users, especially on these platforms, are not that loyal,” he said.
Richter said these examples show that a platform’s dominance doesn’t always last.
“Today, we think of these giants and we think they will be there in the future. Blackberry is a great example, Nokia, AOL. At some point, there’s a need to evolve and grow with their users.
“Longevity relates more to still trying to understand what directions we could grow and what the users want ... The platforms try to understand the users, but then the users over time may also adjust the way they’re using the tools, even adjust the way they’re doing things. So, as long as a platform can evolve together with the users, then it should work,” he said.
When it comes to the “next big thing”, Richter pointed to the advances being made with artificial intelligence (AI).
“What is very important in this space is AI literacy, making informed decisions about AI, being aware of what AI is actually able to do and where we need to be really careful using and not being too trusting in its capabilities.
“I think, in a way, we have learned from the case of social media, where legislation indeed has taken, in many countries, forever to actually acknowledge the risks and dangers of it. The social media ban for children in Australia comes now literally decades after young people started using it,” he said.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about why society moves platforms and the fickle world of tech.
The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
