Some of the speculation about Musk’s decisions have revolves around creating an app that does “everything”. These articles usually refer to popular Asian interfaces that allow one to shop, share, socialize and so forth.
These often seem to exist in countries with some potential barriers due to government, regulation, language, social norms, available technology or lack of alternatives (such as banking being harder to access than phone payments).
Hasn’t this ship sailed? Is there any reason to think technology companies are so trusted many customers would prefer just one program? Or that the barriers to entry differ? Or that even if such an app became popular it would maintain quality in all domains? Obviously some disagree. So I wonder if I’m missing something. Why is using just one app potentially so much better for an average Western user? Are the advantages hype or real? (The advantages to the company are obvious enough.). And if it came to he wouldn’t it likely be broken up anyway?
Musk’s role model, WeChat, works because the government can restrict alternatives and it’s in the Communist Party’s interest to concentrate the average Chinese citizen’s online activity in one easy-to-regulate, easy-to-surveil, easy-to-police place. The breadth of services supports that goal by reducing the reasons someone might be tempted to look outside the walls.
I’ve seen this ideal mentioned often (along with similar interfaces) with little mention of how pragmatic or likely it is at this time outside of places it already exists for reasons mentioned above.
A lot of Americans buy nearly everything from Amazon. Now imagine Amazon had an integrated equivalent to Paypal so I could Amazon money to you to split our dinner check. I could see that becoming quickly popular despite the existence of Venmo, Zelle, etc.
Amazon jumping to be the next twitter or Facebook seems a stretch. Had they bought youtube instead of letting Google have it, they might be an even bigger name in entertainment and streaming than Prime already is.
Market development is always highly path dependent. But it’s generally considered a good thing to have a ready replacement in place or in beta when somebody else overly enshittifies their leading product and an opening presents itself.
…much of the world are going “why do you even need a third-party app to do something as basic as money transfers or payments?”
This is almost entirely a US thing, Venmo, Zelle, etc are services that have developed to serve primarily the American market because the banking system is held together by wire and pneumatic tubes. One source I’ve found suggests that Venmo’s customers are almost 96% based in the US, while Zelle is only available for people with a US bank account and a US registered mobile number.
So that alone makes the potential customer base for a “Twitter Everything App” is relatively, frighteningly small. Nobody else needs it. The ship sailed many years ago.
Twitter/X was never going to be it. Of the top 15 social media apps, the bottom of the list is Reddit with 430 million users - more than Twitter at its peak, though some sources say 450 million. WeChat has 1.2 billion users, and from what I’ve read it’s pretty common for people to send money to people within their family/social circle, a blend of Facebook and Venmo. Twitter didn’t/doesn’t work like that, ime, with clusters of close-knit users.
Zelle is in fact owned by the US banks for the US banks. It’s not really a “third party” app. It is the equivalent of the various national interbank schemes in other nations. As such, it’s hardly surprising their user base is almost purely in the US. E.g. for my US bank, I don’t have a Zelle app on my phone. I use my bank’s app to send money to other Zelle users and it just works regardless of which bank they bank with.
What is typical and unsurprising was that the stodgy US bank industry let several other outfits, Paypal and Venmo notably, get a tremendous head start on developing the market. MasterCard was not the first mass-market credit card, but they eventually controlled most of the market, along with Visa which started out proprietary and later became an industry-wide standard.
I predict a similar trajectory for Zelle. It will slowly but surely crowd out the others at least for transfers between people who even have bank accounts. Which is a shamefully low percentage of the US populace, but represents almost everyone who isn’t perpetually broke and so might have money to transfer someplace.
If I squint, I can imagine something like twitter → Direct messaging (which they have now) → VOIP → Video chat → Superior implementation with eg groups and solid reliability → Sending money → Banking → Crypto. Meta bought WhatsApp for a reason.
But in practice, I imagine it to work more like twitter → X → Crypto → promises to build things out (vaporware).
It seems to be an eternal pipe dream. Way before the internet, even before Microsoft, in the steam-driven days of CP/M, there was a program called ‘The Last One’ which was supposed to do anything you ever needed.
It was written, if I remember correctly, in (wait for it…) BASIC!
I can’t find any evidence that it was written in BASIC. It output BASIC (it was, from what I can tell, a menu-driven program generator.) I read somewhere in my brief research that the programmer said it could have outputted COBOL or Fortran, but that he chose BASIC because it was most familiar to his end-users. The suggests to me that it wasn’t necessarily written in BASIC itself (and I somehow doubt it, though I don’t see why it couldn’t be possible.)
You’ll notice that Facebook and other similar online services are now sort of a universal login server, where you can substitute knowing that one user ID and password for creating and maintaining dozens of separate logins at dozens of unrelated sites. That’s an example of a horizontal do-all. People like to have Facebook, et al, as their universal login server. Whether that’s smart in terms of IT security or personal privacy is not the issue. It’s a product that sells well.
I still do a lot of online shopping at relatively specialty stores. And some at places like Lowes / HD. And much at Amazon. After selection or stock-out problems at most of the specialty places, I’ve switched my search method from starting at specialty then falling back to Amazon to the opposite. Amazon now gets first crack at all my non-grocery dollars. That’s a different sort of horizontal do-all. And first crack at most of my streaming vid-watching time. Which isn’t much, but they get nearly all of it. etc.
It would be real easy to move my primary credit card to Amazon, followed shortly by my retail checking / savings banking if they offered that product. One of the killer apps I’m surprised they haven’t been able to offer is serving as a universal login server a la Facebook.
And so it goes.
I don’t know that each incremental step is so attractive, but I can see somebody like them turning into a do-all, or at least do-most app. And of course extracting a toll from every action you take in either merchant fees, advertising fees, or selling your activity history.
Don’t forget that new users are born every minute and once they get settled in a pattern tend to be very sticky. The [easy] button of everything under one roof sells real well to the younger folks who treat tech as boring ubiquity that just works, not as a hobby to be figured out. Kinda like how we approach electric wall outlets. Not much interest in fiddling with them.
Now that I recall some more, yes, it was a ‘program generator’ that produced a BASIC program in response to a lot of input checkboxes.
I was working in the field at the time, and I seem to remember that the thing itself was written in BASIC?
Not that it really matters: I just mention it as an early example of this kind of hype:
Of course, it will all be done for us by AI tomorrow…