Alternative solutions & owning ecosystems
So you’re learning something new, whether it’s Adobe After Effects, Excel or something physical like Magic The Gathering; there is so much to learn and see.
The question is, where to start? The natural place to start would be the source right? Who could be better at giving you what you need to be successful than the people who designed it? With Magic, you’d buy a preconstructed deck, you go to your local game store to play some casual games and you get your butt kicked or with Adobe After Effects, you try to make a specific effect and it just doesn’t look right with the tools they gave you. You then try to look at the resources on their sites to try and learn more about their products and the tutorials aren’t clicking. After a frustrating 45 minutes, you go on google to find answers and almost immediately find great tutorials and resources for what you need. Over time, you find and save resources across the internet on how to become a better deck builder, a better VFX artist or a better data analyst.
Everyone develops their own sense of what they need to get the most out of the product and what works for them. However, that expertise comes with the realization that there was a big difference between what you needed in order to become proficient with the product and what the company offered to help you become proficient or get the full experience from their product. There are businesses like Channel Fireball (Magic the Gathering articles site and web store), Motion Array (Adobe Presets Marketplace) or Excel Jet (an Excel tutorial site) ready to close the gap that the product companies left open. Why do massive companies like Hasbro, Adobe and Microsoft let other people make solutions for problems they themselves could solve if they really wanted to? Every product has different incentives to not solve certain problems. There are a lot of factors that influence the degree to which companies are willing to solve problems for their customers, but it really boils down to a few questions companies need to ask themselves:
- What areas/uses of the product would people want to individually optimize? This can be answered by engaging with the users of your products to understand not only the components that people want to optimize, but the factors that go into how they optimize these components.
- Can a “good enough” solution optimize individual preferences? Product teams will need to work to develop a solution that will accomplish users’ concerns regarding how they optimize products.
- Can this “good enough” solution be easily scaled? Does it make more sense to create another product to answer these concerns (e.g. Adobe stock effects marketplace) or can it be a feature within the software itself? How do these features changes how the product works?
- If it can’t be scaled practically, how can we benefit from other people solving these problems for us? It’s not necessarily worth it for company employees to make materials for every single possible concern their users may have. Is someone else willing to do the work for them while having it benefit both the problem solver and the product team?
Every company considers these elements differently and every product has different characteristics but, how companies allow alternative solutions to exist can be broadly segmented by understanding how Magic The Gathering, Adobe After Effects and Microsoft Excel cater to their users as well as “allow” alternative solutions.
With Magic the Gathering, players are making individual decisions for what cards they should own and how they should use them, leading to theoretically millions of decisions per player. Wizards of the Coast can only do so much to cluster and design products at the 30,000ft view they have, especially since there isn’t a unified view of every player and every card they own and why. They address this by selling preconstructed decks that will give players a sense for how different kinds of cards behave and sell players booster packs which gives players chances to get the cards they really want. Channel Fireball can come in and write articles about what decks are popular/good, influencing how players collect cards. They also sell players individual cards to give players a less expensive way to get exactly what they want vs booster packs. Wizards of the Coast is more than happy to allow these businesses to exist as long as someone is buying and opening booster packs somewhere, a sale is a sale. There is also a whole issue around booster packs, gambling laws and how secondary markets aid in obfuscating direct cost/benefit analysis, but that’s a story for another time.
Adobe products like After Effects and Photoshop (Premier) are meant to be tools for artists to create whatever they can imagine. There are many factors that go into what a user wants to create and how they actually get the final product including time, cost and quality, so as an option, users can pay to purchase elements created by other users through Adobe’s stock storefront or other websites like Motion Array. There are also tons of websites that give assets away for free or write articles about how to find alternative ways of doing things. Adobe can’t create every possible iteration of every single thing for everybody. However, Adobe is able to create a space that incentivizes users to create materials for Adobe which will have the benefit of not only bolstering the Adobe ecosystem, but create a new revenue stream for them. Just because they own the ecosystem doesn’t make it perfect. The implementation of the Adobe ecosystem isn’t perfect and there are many people with many opinions about Creative Cloud and how Adobe on-boards users.
Microsoft Excel is the well known data wrangling tool used by a variety of people in the working world for all kinds of things. Excel is a very mature product backed by a trillion dollar corporation, so there aren’t too many features or things that a user would want to do that can’t be done in Excel. , you would be hard pressed to not find a way to do it on any one of the endless supply of help websites such as Excel Jet. Since Excel is sold as a package to corporations, Excel has to make sure that any problem people want to solve using their software can be solved using a bit of elbow grease and the tools provided by Excel itself. Just to show the power of Excel products, there are videos of people coding neural nets and even Doom in Excel, which just shows how lush the walled garden of Excel really is.
All three of those examples share one thing in common, they own the ecosystem, which is why they don’t care about squeezing every penny out of every opportunity. Wizards of the Coast is more than happy to let people sell individual cards since someone has to buy the pack to open those cards in the first place. Adobe wants to give users a marketplace to sell their smaller scale assets since they get to make a cut of the sale and make their own platform stronger by making things only work in Adobe ecosystems. Microsoft has slowly built Excel up over time to be the juggernaut that it is so they already are the ecosystem and there is no need to leave the walled garden. By owning the ecosystems their customers use, companies can create feedback loops for building user bases with great communities and having those user bases create products and businesses that make the product ecosystem even stronger, attracting more users. This creates a synergistic solution where both small businesses and large corporations can make money together by making the ecosystems stronger.
