TLDR: Tools that help unstick consumers from previously thought indispensible services are interesting. A pondering.
H1 - Domains unstick consumers from email services
@Leo has been talking about this with regard to own domains for email services: many consumers appear somewhat married to one or another service since they may be used to a @gmail.com or @hotmail.com email address. Once they experiment with their personal domain name, the find that switching from one email provider to another for whichever reason is really not that hard and likely beneficial. I did the same thing with my emails switching from a corporate account and gmail to Fastmail and my own domain. Getting a domain made the email service considerably less sticky to me as a customer.
H2 - Password services unstick consumers from browsers
In a new instance of this type of phenomenon I just noticed how easy LastPass made it for me to try out Chredge. I thought I’d give it a go for a few weeks to see what’s what. Moving from Brave to Chredge was really only a matter of installing LastPass and getting on with it. The hurdle was incredibly easy to get over. The only reason that I am still typing this post in Brave is that Chredge does not support spell check in multiple languages at once - only by changing the keyboard layout (arg!) and restarting Edge (arg!!). Teething pains, but kind of useful to have. They’ll probably figure that out in a few weeks.
H3 - Online productivity/gaming solutions unstick consumers from OSes
Maybe even more obviously, services like the Google productivity suite unstick consumers from their operating systems since they do not represent a requirement to the specific software run on them (e.g., Office for Windows). Certainly, Office goes a different route and ports their offer to Mac, web, and portable, but theirs is an uphill battle since they have to likely invest a multiple of development efforts. Same goes for gaming, to a degree, with Steam bridging the moat to Mac and Linux. Google Stadia and comparable services do this even more relentlessly, even though it might not have had the best of launches.
Granted, this may be the oldest observation known to tech, but I wondered what you think of this. A thought that lent some umpf to this observation was that if Microsoft really wanted Edge to succeed, they might acquire and drive the growth of LastPass (maybe throw in AdBlock Plus in the mix) to eradicate the hurdle of saved passwords. They could even do it claiming to drive end consumer safety.
I wonder which other cases are out there and interesting to look at. Given the balkanisation (every content provider builds their app) and reintegration (Apple TV) of streaming services, maybe there is one area but I am sure there are others.
I wonder:
Which other areas are there where services are becoming more prominent to unstick consumers?
Which areas could benefit from such services but do not have them yet?
How can companies use these services to unstick consumers from incumbents?
Is there something here to learn? If yes: what is it, in your perspective?
Looking forward to your thoughts - thanks for sharing in advance!