Are Amazon, Microsoft, and Google Too Big to be Defeated?
Giant corporations such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have become so massively ingrained into the technological backbone of the world that it sometimes seems like they're untouchable. They each offer many services, among them are cloud based application development and hosting services. It seems like just yesterday everything was moving into the cloud and these giants were in the forefront of this push. Right now, these services are very successful and would seem to be looking very promising. However, there could be trouble brewing that they may not be able to overcome. What could possibly be a threat to Amazon? Let's dive in and take a look!
Image Source: Pixabay
How Industry Goliath's Fall
In Clayton M. Christensen's 1997 book titled "the Innovators Dilemma - when new technologies cause great firms to fail" he discusses in great depth how time and again companies at the forefront of their respective fields have been usurped by disruptive technologies originating within much smaller organizations. The Harvard professor emphasizes how even the most formidable of organizations seem to exhibit certain vulnerabilities when it comes to these new innovations. One in particular that he discusses in his book is the value network of the organization as defined below.
"the context within which a firm identifies and responds to customers' needs, solves problems, procures input, reacts to competitors, and strives for profit"
- Clayton M. Christensen: Innovator's Dilemma
Although the value network helps businesses strive to best serve their customers and make excellent business decisions among their direct competitors, it can sometimes hinder the organizations visibility into up and coming solutions that may eventually become their replacement. So, all things equal, the value network is a valuable asset that shields an organization. In most scenarios it helps that company grow and prosper. The vulnerability it leaves is that of a complete structural or technological overhaul, which without outside forces acting upon it would be a colossal waste of time and resources being that at any given time an overhaul of this nature would be mostly speculative and unproven. They have investors to answer to and customers to keep happy already and that's where the focus has to be, otherwise direct competitors will overtake their market share. This vulnerability to structural overhaul in their respective space is easily looked over until such a disruptive innovation is introduced. What we normally find is that by the time the disruptive innovation is recognized and they start to combat it, others have a firm first mover advantage in that space and their fate is all but sealed.
"The reason is that good management itself was the root cause. Managers played the game the way it was supposed to be played. The very decision-making and resource-allocation processes that are key to the success of established companies are the very processes that reject disruptive technologies"
- Clayton M. Christensen: Innovator's Dilemma
Clayton explains in great length how innovations within the computer storage market led to the fall of many of the industry giants of their time. I recommend reading this book, as it goes into great depth as to who the industry leaders were throughout multiple phases of storage development from the first hard drives developed through more modern storage innovations. One of the things that made me gravitate towards this book was how relatable these concepts were to the blockchain technologies currently emerging. Then, one of the things that reminded me of this book later was reading through the Crowd Machine whitepaper. Here's why!
Crowd Machine
For those who are heavily into Crypto, they might see a path to disrupting competitors like Amazon and Microsoft just by hearing this: Dapps. Dapps, or decentralized applications, have been a massive driver in the cryptocurrency space that typically allow the storage of data for an application to reside within a blockchain protocol run by many machines across a peer-to-peer network. On platforms like Ethereum and Neo, many unique and promising projects have been created using blockchain technology. Many other Dapp protocols have been created or are being currently worked on and appear to be quite promising. Dapps by default propose a disruptive technology that could topple a giant like Amazon because they nullify the cloud based storage perks that have driven the latest developments by Amazon. Instead of requiring a centralized and expensive server based infrastructure, Dapps call upon machines all across the world that already are in existence and connected to the internet for storage solutions.
Image Source: Pixabay
Crowd Machine doesn't stop at handling storage needs for Dapps though, it has also taken extra steps to leverage the peer-to-peer structure already in place to improve performance via distribution of system resources throughout the entire network. A centralized competitor would have a large amount of resources available, but in the end of the day those resources are restricted to the number of servers they can maintain as an organization. You can see how this could pose scalability issues in a very app driven world. Where there are scalability issues, price issues are sure to follow. Crowd Machine is only limited by the number of machines on the internet, which in the context of applications that could be built in the real world might as well be infinite.
As if that's not enough, Crowd Machine also has another trick up it's sleeve that has disruptive technology potential. This is their user-friendly pattern based software development model. These patterns cascade down into activities, packages, and attributes that would normally have to be written out in long complex code. Crowd Machine allows non-programmers to generate code by starting on the pattern level, automatically generating the underlying code. This means that if you have a great Dapp idea that you want to pursue, but you don't know how to write in Solidity to create the Ethereum based application you envisioned, you can now model out your application without needing to be an expert programmer. Although the above example is using Ethereum, Crowd Machine describes itself as having agnostic support. This means developers will have the ability to use multiple Dapp protocols and even migrate between them if needed.
Image Source: Crowd Machine whitepaper
Summary
So, let's recap a bit here. Crowd Machine provides Decentralized Applications that utilize storage across a peer-to-peer network. Amazon and other competitors are centralized and must accommodate all the resource needs of their clients and maintain them. Crowd Machine also provides the ability to leverage other computer resources outside of just storage across it's network. The competition does not have the infrastructure to do this due to it's centralization of resources. Crowd Machine provides pattern based software development and support for multiple Dapp protocols. The competition does not have pattern based development and requires more in depth knowledge of programming to create apps. Put this all together and what you get is a quick, streamlined, and efficient method of producing and running applications in a way the competition cannot. A method that they estimate can improve the speed of getting your apps to the market 45x faster than using the competition. This sounds just like the examples in the book referenced earlier, the Innovator's Dilemma, where new organizations built something structurally superior to the industry leaders and took over. Look for Crowd Machine to repeat history and take over the app development market!
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