Why ExoTech Users Won’t Want to Leave Us
Who could possibly have predicted how popular Facebook was going to be, before it was launched? Or how unbelievably fast it would be accepted throughout the world by both young and old?
Today, of course, there are several social media platforms that people use, but users are tending to migrate from one to another over time. Witness the recent drop in Facebook users that frightened the business world so badly, it sparked a 20% drop in Facebook’s share price. That’s pretty scary.
So, if ExoTech is going to create a new community of users, will they stay with us? Or will they wander off to some up-and-coming, so called, competitor, who is offering a cheaper, but supposedly similar product?
Well, let’s consider what has happened in the past. Did you know that there was a time when nobody had email? You younger people will be saying to yourselves, “What, no email? That’s like saying no mobile phones…” Well, they didn’t exist either, some 40 years ago.
Believe it or not, such times did exist. I remember, in 1982, IBM had an internal email system that we used. You could send an internal message (effectively an email) from one computer to another, to any of 350,000 co-workers. But there was no public email. A few years later, when that became available, it was very obvious that this was an amazing new invention.
Just think of it. All those aunties who used to write letters to their nephews and nieces, could now send an email that would arrive almost instantly; anywhere around the world. Letters, or snail mail as it is often called, used to take a week to 10 days to be delivered to another country.
Mind you, I can go back further than that, to when letters usually went by sea, not air. When I was in the UK in the early 60s, I used to write to my parents in Australia and I always used to pay extra for the new airmail service, because sea-mail took 4 to 5 weeks.
So, what have we got here? We have the beginnings of a very rapid means of communication. You could write an email to someone on the other side of the planet and, if they were awake, get a response back in just a few minutes. Can you see what that would do to social communication in the 1980’s? It was a game-changer; a game-changer in spades. But the key here is the added function that emails provided, compared with the old-fashioned letter.
People love to be a part of a group, or a community. And the first email systems made a huge impact on that desire. Suddenly you had the function available to talk to your friends and loved ones in a very rapid and efficient manner, no matter where they were. Mind you, it was text only at that stage. You could not send pictures and there was very little formatting capability. But that was really the serious change to social media – going from letter to email.
From there email improved, and got more fancy, with pictures, and the ability to attach other files to be sent, like audio files or short videos. But it was all in the same environment – communicating with those you wanted to be involved with.
Facebook, Twitter, Tick-Tock, and all the other social media giants that have developed in the last 20 years, were only successful because they added more function to the existing social media environment. You could produce jazzy modification to your pictures, or present and decorate your own series of pictures and videos, or form special groups and invite (or “unfriend”) people as you chose. And all the time you were building, or contributing to, a social community of people. That was the exciting part that was driving this whole thing forward.
Now, some people say these social media platforms are getting so big because of the advertising opportunities they present. Well, that’s probably not the case, because adverts on social media pages do not generate more social media activity; they simply generate profit dollars for the people who placed the ads there. And for the social media owner, of course…
What drives the social media platform and keeps it growing, is the continued interest of the participants. And that is largely influenced by the functions available to the members of the community.
So, what is ExoTech doing to address this whole thing? We are adding more function! People will be able to do all of the wonderful things they currently do on existing social media, but they will find a whole new area of opportunity opening up for them.
Imagine that you have used the extremely easy functions of changing the design and layout of your ExoBrain desktop to produce not one, but many different looks and feels. And now you share those with your friends and family. You can do that in just a few seconds – it’s really simple. And then you find that someone in your “community” has modified the way they generate and send emails and it looks really cool. So they give you a copy and now you have that function too. This is social media functionality in the extreme.
And, how about some of your technical friends or relations who develop a really cool app to keep track of planned events for the team and they share it with everyone in the group. Wouldn’t that be exciting.
Or; maybe you have some flair in a particular area, and you use that ability to produce a unique app that is really useful and a whole lot better than what people can normally get. So, you make it available for others to buy, anywhere in the world! Wow – that could be incredible, not to mention profitable.
So what’s happening here is that ExoTech creates an environment that lends itself to the creation of self-generating social media groups that will thrive and grow much faster than would happen in most other social media platforms. Because ExoTech is dramatically extending the available function.
And, before you know it, you have created an environment where most of the users are locked in; for good! With all the sharing of apps, designs and desktops, plus all the existing social media components (blogs, photos, friends, etc.), there is much less chance that they will ever leave that environment. They are too tied up with all the added goodies they and their friends have created.
And that’s why users won’t want to leave ExoTech. Because it is going to generate a social media platform that has so much more function to offer, they will never want to lose it.
Neil Clark graduated from Gordon Institute of Technology, Geelong, Australia, as an Electrical Engineer. One of his first jobs was redesigning the entire electrical control system for the Fuel Recharging process at the Hunterston Nuclear Power Station in Scotland in the early 1960s.
Neil worked with IBM Australia from 1973 to 1992 where he was the Product Manager for the IBM PC through the 1980s. He took an early retirement package and then started his own business offering database development services for small businesses.
He has worked selling, marketing and as a product manager in the computer industry, so has a wide gamut of knowledge that he brings to his position in ExoTech Ltd, as well as being a published author.