Saturday, September 28, 2019

"Subscription Capitalism: The Story of a Power Shift"

From American Affairs Journal, volume III, number 3, Fall 2019:
The emergence of the internet changed the business landscape in fundamental ways. Computer-based services could be offered to anyone irrespective of geographic restrictions. This meant that internet companies could become globally significant with relatively little initial investment, as demonstrated by Facebook, Google, and several others. Their ability to rapidly concentrate wealth with relatively little overhead caught the attention of many entrepreneurs and investors and continues to evolve today.

Basic internet services began in the 1960s with time-sharing on computers. This gradually evolved into sharing entire applications online. It was a simple step from there for companies to offer complete online software services, some of the most prominent being full-service email such as Hotmail and Gmail in the 1990s.

Monetizing the internet, however, was not a straightforward proposition. When the internet first emerged, people saw it as a great democracy where anyone with a good idea could set up a business with little cost. This lowered barriers to entry and thus offered the promise of moving the economy closer to a pure “free market,” a system that better rewarded good ideas and merit over money or position.

Many free services appeared, not the least of which were search engines. When Google was first born, it was simply one of many search engines. In the process of becoming dominant, Google either bought out or made irrelevant all other search engines. Today, there are some people who think Google’s search engine is the internet instead of part of the internet.

Despite Google’s near monopoly, Google’s search engine remains free to use. At first glance, it seems puzzling that a large corporation would spend considerable resources to dominate a market and not use its place and power to force revenue from its users. This is because licensing software is not Google’s main money-making strategy. Google’s strategy requires large numbers of people to use its software, and the best way to generate traffic is to build high quality, free-to-use software packages that help everyone. On the surface, this aligns well with the widely held belief that the internet should remain free.

Although free products propagated across the internet, businesses never lost their desire to monetize the internet. At first, it looked impossible—how do you monetize free goods? To monetize such an environment, either everyone would have to agree to sell their software or no one could, with the exception of large, highly specialized programs such as Adobe Photoshop or (at the time) AutoCAD.

There were efforts to create paywalls throughout the internet, but this largely failed, just as newspapers are rediscovering today. This forced companies to think of different ways to monetize their products. The process branched into two distinct paths depending on whether the customers were enterprises or consumers. Both these methods altered the basic business relationship from one of sellers offering property in exchange for money to one of sellers renting their property to customers. In other words, sellers are increasingly retaining the power and rights of property ownership while retaining its customer-derived income. This is changing the power dynamics between customer and seller.

The Growth of Cloud Computing

As soon as internet technology became sufficient to reliably handle high bandwidths, business-to-enterprise activity exhibited a marked increase. Successful marketing of online services to businesses largely succeeded because of demonstrated savings on the cost of doing business. These new enterprises have been classified into various categories, including Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Everything as a Service (XaaS), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Functions as a Service (FaaS). All these activities can be described as cloud computing, where a service (be it storage, software, or other service) is supplied via the internet.

Before cloud computing, every business had to set up their own independent onsite IT operations, often duplicating the IT functions of other companies. For example, large firms need software processes to manage, track, and report their sales activity. After the proliferation of fast internet connections and large shared servers, however, entrepreneurs saw that if they set up a secure online sales service package, they could offer the same or similar online solution to several companies.

Development costs of IT functions are similar whether services are offered to one or many companies, so it is obviously more profitable to sell the service to many business customers.
The result, on the surface at least, is win-win—the seller makes greater profits while the businesses save money by not having to build their own IT functions. The customers receive leading edge IT services offered at a fraction of the cost. Further, should business IT needs suddenly increase, the cloud service is responsible for scaling the software project, not the business customer. The enterprise customer benefits from a lower cost of business and minimizes the responsibilities of managing IT resources as the business grows.

Another advantage of using existing services is certainty. For a business manager, purchasing a proven IT service removes considerable risk. An online journal, ZDNet, recently asked: “Would you rather host your data on an inflexible, costly and potentially unstable in-house resource, or would you rather work with a trusted external partner who is an expert in secure hosting?”1 It is easy to understand how an experienced manager would be much more likely to reach for the proven software of a cloud service rather than ask his IT department to create something from scratch. This is borne out by the fact that the vast majority of cloud service contracts are initiated by business managers, not IT departments.

Ownership and Control

It is important to note, however, that once the IT department work has moved off premises, the business no longer owns that service or the infrastructure that delivers it. Instead, the company is investing in an intangible service from a centralized source. There are several consequences of this trend....
....MUCH MORE