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You Don’t Want To Be Trapped in Their Ecosystem
How to break free from the tech industry prison
Rainforests.
Coral Reefs.
Polar Oceans.
The bottom my college refrigerator.
In the natural world these are areas we call ecosystems, a delicately balanced habitat home to myriad plants and animals that all live together in harmony and support each other evolved over millennia. The ecosystem does not like new variables: introduce a new species or change the ambient temperature and things will quickly fall apart. Nature does not want anything to leave, although my landlady certainly did.
In the tech world we have what we call ecosystems. The end result of decades of innovation and development, the idea here is much the same as in nature: all your devices work together in harmony and support each other. This keeps you onside as a customer almost indefinitely and they most certainly do not want you to leave. This is inevitably backed up by software and content you cannot get elsewhere.
Although the idea has been around for decades we could make a strong arguement that the poster person for current ecosystem trends is Apple. By building a strong interoperability between their products they have built up a loyal customer base for whom anything less is almost blasphemy…
