Digital Utility Agents and The Fabric

Web rooming and show rooming are not new concepts. Show rooming....you are right in gawking out on this as show rooming is so yesterdays news that ended with some people using Amazon's bar code scanner on brick and mortar. I think we can add to those two terms up streaming and down streaming as the online version of show rooming when visitors to one cite go some where else to transact. If you are the party creating a deliberate redirection you profit, for other cases an equilibrium is eventually reached. That equilibrium for some companies is the end of the business and, others struggle to maintain or improve status quo and yet others carve a place to thrive.

        Although humans have a natural tendency towards path of least resistance and we lean to the comfort and security of the known vs. unknown, the reality of the internet is no barrier to free roam and no shame to change loyalty. We all gravitate to more frequent as more stable and many times the benevolence of the customer towards carefully crafted and free content does not offset the lethargy of creating a new account and  the inertia of easier to deal with existing relation. As the users tolerance of ever increasing content and marketing mechanisms reduces to the point that they automatically lean on the path of least resistance, the path that is the known "eco system" owned by few companies or the path where big chunks of the e-commerce funnel is owned by few companies, the race for keeping the users engaged on their platforms heats up; the quest of large technology driven companies.
       
          The future carves its own path and there is always a chance that companies vying for internet of things, autonomous vehicles, AR, VR, AI, HRI (human robot interfaces) and BCI (brain computer interface) get their piece of the computerized commerce and that is one of the reasons why many companies are trying to capture the next phase of computer intelligence by investing in AI hoping that their intelligence becomes the core of the digital fabric or it comes to be the core of some integral part of the digital fabric. For now innovation and early entry into various important blocks like Smart devices, Operating System, Information scoring hubs, Communication hubs, Voice assistants and many of the everyday DUAs (digital utility agents) that we rely on and engage with on regular basis come from few big companies. The digital utility agents are the software and hardware widgets, gadgets, sites apps and everything in between. All of that digital abstraction that delivers us some function, task, or emotional engagement, I call it a digital utility agent.

          While larger players are on a constant quest to create product and service adjacencies in their offerings and to weave themselves as intricate part of our day, from reciting the morning news to turning off lights at night, other companies have to try to make their offerings a requisite part of the digital fabric by finding ways to either become part of the undercurrent that moves the users towards the hubs controlling the information flow or to become hubs themselves. The future will belong to the companies that are working to become part of the digital fabric not just using it.