Image via Wikipedia - Apps and IconsCrowdsourcing, Brainstorming And Collaboration: everyone seems to see the benefits to the populace as a whole when 'free' computer and mobile apps, 'open source' programs and software products are made available to the eager, ever-hungry public. The group-centered creative process is indisputably powerful -- its magic formula... limitless access to limitless numbers of limitless minds. The distribution process is hyper-efficient: all of the co-creators and their social circles will use, review and promote what's produced. Ultimately, word and utilization travel virally.
The social media and communications platforms benefiting (i.e., improving or increasing their respective use of their platforms; platforms and communications media like Twitter, Facebook, iPad, Blogger, Wordpress and others) by this seemingly endless cloudburst of apps even help to encourage ["Developers? Work with our API to develop your ingenious new applications and integrated uses for our product! Work with our development team.), advertise and promote them.
Confession: The title of this article is slightly misleading. Apologies. My trend-watchers, predictors, market prognosticators and sophisticated business audience already know that the notion of "trading" commercialization for public access is actually ephemeral. Sooner or later, the endgame is invariable the harnessing of every application, innovation and invention for a profit. It's just a matter of "How?" and "When?" And after these are answered, the question is "Who will gain and who will turn (the customerization process) from a free-user to a monthly payer or subscriber?"
Skeptics ask two questions: "Who makes a profit?" and "How do they make it?" Take a glance at the following article excerpt, which is over a month old but incredibly applicable, and then please hit the "BACK" button on the upper left-hand corner of your browser and return. We'll wait for you.
From the BigThink Daily IdeaFeed:
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Crowdsourced And Free Navigation Apps Taking Off
New, free navigation apps with an emphasis on social features and crowdsourced data are providing competition for premium providers such as TomTom, Garmin, CoPilot and Navigon.
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And now to the ever-irksome questions that are begging to be asked by business strategists, obsessive monetizers, dependent users and Global Futurists... and other persons who are considered by some to be skeptics and cynics, but whom I consider to be intelligent business pragmatists.
The process of monetization of these "open" and "free" source innovations is ongoing, but I believe that the timeframe from first release of new technology to monetization is going to be shrinking as a result of the weak global economy, the rise in the acceptability and utilization of cybercommerce, the increasing dependence on mobile devices for information and communication, and the growing population of people actively involved (either socially or commercially) in social media.
Ego gratification and the desire to share may initiate the creative processes, but real-world, real-time necessity accelerates the compulsion to convert from ego gratification and "psychic income" to creative conversion over to monetization.
WHO WILL PROFIT? AND HOW WILL THEY PROFIT?
1) Developers - Developers will be paid in the form of awards, contest prizes, promotion, and occasionally sales-based royalties from the benefitted platforms and media. If the developers have used open-sourcing, collaboration or crowd-sourcing they could, in theory pro-rate their benefits (both direct financial and endorsement-based) with their many collaborators as stakeholders. It is far more likely that the visionary organizers of these projects shall benefit directly and give 'thanks' to their contributors in the form of honorable mention. Exploiters often dominate and prevail. Others, less assertive merely settle for 'thanks,' laminated MVP certificates, bragging rights and other honorable discharges and trivial dismissal documents.
Some developers will be acquired, individually or corporately by the platform and media hosts in a "brain roundup" of talent and in marriages of political convenience -- i.e., to avoid IP legal battles and to avoid encouraging too much entrepreneurial independence. Picture a kinder, gentler Bill Gates, giving you a choice between a wonderful, glamorous career or an exsanguination.
Other developers will remain independent and continue to offer a free version of their innovations, but will begin developing and offer a "premium" or "professional" upgraded version of their products and services for a small recurring fee to the users. Picture charging a growing population of adherents a very small nuisance tax that is just too inexpensive to be objectionable. Heck, my subscription to Pingler only costs me $5.00 per month. I couldn't live without it. To get the Widgetbox "Pro" membership costs me, on average, $1.99 per month -- while I don't use it much, I just can't be bothered to cancel it.
2) The Platform Hosts And Media Providers - These companies will be benefitted by an increased flood of user volume to their respective platforms and media due to the convenience and an increased us of these applications, from Sudoku, to GPS restaurant locators, to mobile apps to access and support all of your social media and messaging activity. Firstly, their revenues will be increased from advertisers and commercial users due to their decreasing CPM and ever-increasing social and business audience and influence. Advertisers and promoters will be paying more to these old pros -- rates will rise.
After advertisers and commercial users are more fully trussed up and dependent, these larger hosts and providers will go after consumers (picture Bank Of America, Netflix and your beloved utilities providers raising prices to end-users directly, but with less fanfare, and engendering less hatred or mass exodus threats). Of course, once consumers begin to get used to the idea of paying a "trivial" fee for what used to be free services, those fees will never, ever be reduced --- I would predict a high likelihood that they will be increased on a regular basis thereafter.
3) Collaborators, As Teams And Individual Members - As the participants in these large, currently nameless, faceless crowds become more sophisticated with time, experience and watching the success of the early-exploiters (my projected horizon for this awakening is over the course of three years, starting toward the end of the first quarter of 2012, and slowing down toward the end of the time horizon due a flooding of the marketplace with app litter, increased competition amongst these collaborative developer teams, i.e., bidding the price of the services down in accordance with the basic Law Of Supply And Demand), and the increased acceptance of software as a service with the expansion of the Cloud.
Incidentally, "The Cloud" still scares me. This is not only in terms of the dependency on yet a new set of utilities-like companies, but also due to the increased vulnerability to data theft, and the cost of downtime and defaults, and a feeling of the backups and modifications and parallel systems which will have to be deployed by companies which wish to mitigate and contain the risks involved in this "one-size-fits-all" type of solution. Also, The Cloud sounds ominously like the title of a B-grade science fiction movie or of a lesser Stephen King short story.
Douglas E. Castle for The Global Futurist
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