The Age of Platforms as Common as Cafes

The model driving the iPhone and Apple is the App Store.
But Apple didn't build the App Store first and unveil it first.
They didn't even build the iPhone first.
First, they looked for what people were carrying around and obsessed with every day.
That's how the iPod and iTunes came out.

Even so, domestic companies like Samsung and Pantech Curitel, along with many overseas firms, benchmarked the App Store.. and in the end, all of them failed. Of course, it's not an ecosystem on the level of the App Store, but.. Korea's One Store at least still hangs on. You may or may not know, it's a conglomerate-backed one.


..? Yeah.. right. The old man Jobs is, frankly, in a league of his own..


Of course,
there are plenty of similar domestic cases.
Kakao, which has now grown into a rather oddly morbidly-obese platform,
wasn't a platform from the start.
It was just a messenger. Back then, people cheered even for something as simple as free internet texting.
Those were the days when people switched to smartphones just because of KakaoTalk. Back in my day..



The "new normal" and the singularity carry a nuance of leveling everything upward, but they also seem to bring a break in context.
That's because the standard of "basic" — in other words, the common sense of society or of an industry — shifts. To avoid falling behind, the key is how much faster and sooner you can face this transition.
But the biggest vulnerability of this upward-leveling is that when the infrastructure or common sense underneath that leveling is absent, it becomes so absurdly unable to play its role.
For example, in ordinary everyday life for an ordinary person — if your phone is gone for a few hours? If the internet doesn't work? In that instant, the everyday life of an ordinary person is no longer ordinary. I think it's because of familiarity and the unconscious. Of course, not only personal routines but also the patterns of companies and industries are included here.

My thoughts have wandered quite a bit.. back to platforms. The reason platforms have become so common is.. it's often said that it's because users' level and their basic requirements — that is, the degree of what they take for granted — have risen. But actually, that's not really it.
The first reason is that people benchmarked only the already-derived results, without the initial model or the process. They take only part of the final product, customize it to their own circumstances, and pursue differentiation. The result is that the outputs look similar.. only in the explanations and promotions is the "uniqueness" oddly emphasized.
The second reason is that the market pie has already been shrinking. Over the past ten years, this market has shrunk about as much as it can shrink. Some might bristle, asking "what are you talking about" when there are markets worth trillions of won or hundreds of billions in a single category. But here's the thing. That pie already includes not only the pure market and expected transaction volume that originated from mobile, but also the online/offline markets and existing transactional markets. And what deserves even more attention.. is that the big brothers' investment amounts are already converging too closely on those expected figures. It's like the feeling of apartment jeonse prices catching up with the sale price. So those big markets and categories have begun, in the name of being strategic, to cooperate, partner, and merge with one another.
It started with killer apps (services that turn inconvenience into convenience). They were free. Then popular paid apps appeared. The "pure" app market became saturated. At some point, freemium apps became the majority. Starting with fashion, offline products went online via e-commerce, and then began to be traded on mobile. And the categories expanded from specialty goods to everyday goods. At this point, social appeared and the market expanded rapidly. These players created a new consumption culture, and the definition of "what gets transacted" gradually shifted from formal to informal. They also played a decisive role in shifting the common sense of content consumption from free to paid. In various ways, the expanded product categories gradually came to include sensory (entertainment) forms, and to handle this, smartphone memory and specs gradually advanced, and eventually million-won phones became mainstream. And now this market has begun to trade not products (services, goods, or content...) but each individual's data. It's an extremely natural outcome. No matter how much the smartphone expands (not physically, but in the scope of the roles it can perform and the purposes it can contain..), there's a limit to what users of this device can absorb. Just like information overload. From the ICT (Information and Communication Technology) perspective, just as curation and subscription services naturally arise in an age of information overload, now we've come to the point of buying and selling data embedded in individuals' daily lives. It was a level already set in stone.
That's to say, within the mobile market, whatever could be sold has already been sold. So what's needed is not AR or VR but the metaverse. The so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, strictly speaking, isn't something consumers or ordinary people in everyday life need — it's what this market needs. And very urgently..


As a result, it has become a market where you can't do it unless it's a platform.
Even if not right now, at the very least, in next year's or the year after's plans, a platform has to exist.. Like the gap between college grads and high school grads in the real world, in the atmosphere, it's become one of the essential conditions for survival.





Just, that's how it is.