Over-Platformed

Everywhere you turn these days is a new platform you need to sign up for. The promise of specificity and customization has turned into a nightmare of passwords and logins. It sounded great – you can totally customize your set of things you need because every platform out there does one thing really well. Except that now you're juggling thirty things you signed up for. Oh, and there’s always a new one. 

And I don’t just mean design programs here. Everything from paying bills to online education to document writing has a hundred options for you to choose from. Need I say the word “streaming” without inducing anxiety? No discussion about a new series is without the question, “But what is it on?” Meaning, am I signed up on that platform and can I watch it? It’s like always picking the slow line at the grocery store. Whatever you want is somewhere else.

I started thinking about this because we did a deep dive on new software at work. Basically, just about anything you might try out does 2-3 things really well and one thing really poorly. This leaves you to decide which thing is least important to you. Or, you can just stick with whatever you’re already using, which starts to seem very quickly like the right thing to do. 

Because once you inhabit a particular platform they make it very hard for you to switch. This is why even though you may be frustrated with your bank (as I was recently with one too many mergers) it sets a painful series of events in motion. Opening a new account is relatively easy, but now I am standing at the cliff of having to switch all my bill pay and automatic deposits/payments. That would give anyone pause. It is giving me pause. 

And in some situations they hold your information. Square is a popular payment software for small businesses, and while they collect emails for you conveniently, I have learned recently that they do not give you direct access to those emails. You have to choose a paid subscription to send out emails to your own customer list.

"...opportunity cost. That’s the idea that every dollar, or hour, or brain cell you spend doing one thing is a dollar, an hour, or a brain cell you can’t spend on some other opportunity. There’s another idea called the sunk-cost fallacy. A sunk cost is the time or money or effort you’ve already spent. The fallacy is the belief that, since you’ve already spent all those resources, you’d be foolish to quit. But in reality — this is what economists argue, at least — those sunk costs are a distraction, and if what you’re doing isn’t likely to work out, you should stop throwing good money and time and effort after bad. Now, that makes sense too, doesn’t it? But it does leave you with a dilemma." – Source

This rant bumps up against my previous rant about inconvenient convenience – things sold to us as making our lives easier in one aspect, but then they make some other aspect more difficult. It’s always a trade off. Again, the productivity bros are always talking about the wrong thing. You're stuck with the sunk cost of whatever time you have spent onboarding. Or, you can stand at the cliff of opportunity cost.