Anubis will fall: The rise of platform independence
Gatekeepers come under question in the tech space
Background
Motivated by an article by Hamish McKinzie.
We are now seeing the beginning of an economic and technological shift that will reshape the media economy. Writers and creators are branching out from old institutions and building new online properties where they are in charge. These creators have found not only more freedom and autonomy but also a stable income. The top writers on Substack earn millions of dollars a year.
This shift has the potential to correct a power imbalance that, in the internet’s primitive commercial era, has delivered tremendous benefits to platform owners while leaving creators to hustle, struggle, and pray for scraps. This shift is happening not because of a smarter algorithm, the arrival of a more callous kingpin, or some kind of government intervention—it’s happening because of the rising demand that creators must have ownership of their audiences.
McKenzie’s key idea is that content creators have been at the mercy of opaque algorithms due to aggregation platforms holding too much power and mass access to consumers. This is the core issue Substack was looking to solve. It seems to have found a solution that works. Its reported 3 million paid subscribers seem to indicate so.
It’s easy to contrast Substack with Medium and understand the benefits: a platform that doesn’t impose its design onto its creators, where the creator controls the relationship they have with their audience and where the creator can leave whenever they choose (this ease in ditching the platform is actually a great boon to Substack , since any tensions with creators will be extremely visible to the platform’s team). What might not be so obvious is the extent to which digital independence movements are taking root across service platforms and technology providers. Substack and the long-form content community is far from the only case of such disruption. There’s dozens of such movements across industries and communities, and the internet seems to be facing a revolution beyond the media economy. The sands within the technology sector are shifting.
Lock-in: A broader challenge
The idea of such aggregation with tech, with a central platform building a moat around itself, trapping any service providers or consumers on their platform stuck within their realm, is not a new one. One of the originals in this category was Google’s Search and SEO, which put the PageRank algorithm as a firm decision maker. Years later, SEO would still be a hot topic among developers, publishers and marketing managers. While there have been many competitors like DuckDuckGo which have challenged the dominance of this algorithm, Google has been able to maintain a majority control of how the world interacts with search. A more recent example would be the rise of Firebase and the pain of migration away from it, which has prompted many different open source alternatives, where mitigating vendor lock-in has been an important differentiating factor.
The value such a system brings with it can take a variety of shapes, from extensive community support available for popular SDKs (all eyes on React.js) and ease of interoperability between cloud solutions under the umbrella of a single platform (think proprietary messaging pipelines like Amazon’s Simple Notification Service) to the preferential treatment to ecosystem insiders (Apple’s iOS, macOS and watchOS integrations).
Why does it matter?
Vendor lock-in can be insidious due to the monopolies it creates. Apart from the obvious cost issues due to lack of competition, this can possibly make an entire ecosystem extremely fragile.
A prime example for this is the turmoil recently during the OpenAI leadership debacle. Dozens of founders and VCs were left panicking as OpenAI descended into an enigmatic conflict between different members of its board. While this episode ended as abruptly as it started, it caused many to worry about the stability associated with the large language models and their ecosystems that many products now rely on.
The questions then are: could this have become worse? What would those depending upon this technology do in that situation? Similar issues can arise within spaces with a few incumbents, and the users of this technology can be left with no comparable or reliable options to migrate to.
Firebase: The Supabase alternative?
Among the flurry of product launches at Google IO 2024, it was pretty easy to miss out on all the changes its end-to-end mobile and web backend solution. Firebase now has first-class support for SQL backends.
The keen eyed would definitely notice an important detail: Support for SQL has been emblematic of Supabase, Firebase’s primary open source competitor. Supabase’s brand always portrays it clearly as a Firebase alternative. While this resemblance received it's fair share of quips, developers using either solution did acknowledge that Supabase has been able to gain considerable ground against Firebase lately. Many believe Firebase’s Data Connect suite is meant to bridge the gap between itself and Supabase. Even popular low-code framework, FlutterFlow, allows for integration with both these options.
Apart from this functional difference, Supabase also brings with itself a self-hosting option. An entire instance of Supabase’s core services can be run on-premise from anywhere. Supabase also utilizes open source protocols for most of its services instead of proprietary options, such as using a PostgreSQL database compared to Firebase’s proprietary Cloud Firestore, which has an API different from open source NoSQL alternatives. While Firebase does integrate well into the Google Cloud Platform (more on that later), Supabase gives users the freedom to move away from their hosted solutions and even move out of Supabase completely and use third-party services for any part (or the whole) of their stack if needed.
This open source and non-proprietary nature of Supabase has made it a great alternative to Firebase, and has outdone Amazon’s Amplify in every imaginable way. This is a signal by the development community of their opinion on vendor lock-in and where things are headed.
Cloud: Stuck in the haze
The forefront of this open vs proprietary war has been within the cloud sector, where Amazon Web Services stands as the incumbent known for its many attempts and design decisions aimed at keeping users from being able to migrate. Very much aware of these concerns, AWS even posted an article to convince executives that vendor lock-in is not an issue. That’s an opinion many don’t agree with.
New providers focus on openness
Linode, a major cloud provider, was built on the philosophy of being able to separate from the platform. An important part of this was to use open protocols from the get-go, building a system that customers can migrate from easily. Other platforms like Cloudflare and DigitalOcean help customers devise strategies and multi-cloud setups which would allow them to move away from the platform if they so desire.
Support for platform-agnostic tooling
Within the last few years, all cloud providers, including the incumbents, have been pushing for customers to use systems that are platform-agnostic. The likes of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service have allowed customers to architect applications with technologies which decouple the platform and the application, allowing easy portability, such that their applications can be run on any cloud provider’s platform. While this has allowed some sense of security to users who might be worried about the elevating costs they might need to bear, it still can be far from perfect.
Incumbents face competition
While AWS still holds the top position, Microsoft has approached closer in 2024. At the same time, smaller providers like DigitalOcean and Render are gaining ground. This trend seems to lean towards a multi-provider future, where lock-in would be a problem customers will take into account for their decisions.
Accountability: Governments Intervene
In March 2024, the US Department of Justice sued Apple for anti-competitive behavior. Apple’s alleged offenses were quoted as:
Apple’s Broad-Based, Exclusionary Conduct Makes It Harder for Americans to Switch Smartphones, Undermines Innovation for Apps, Products, and Services, and Imposes Extraordinary Costs on Developers, Businesses, and Consumers
- The Department of Justice of the United States of America
While Apple has appealed this motion, this is putting immense pressure on the giant to break up their monopoly. Recently, Apple has conceded ground towards building a more open ecosystem, allowing game emulators on the platform. More such changes are being anticipated.
Recently, the European Union fined Apple €1.8 billion for limiting openness around music streaming information. This has also shook the company, which can have major implications for the iOS ecosystem within the EU.
These are not the only times a government is looking to limit vendor lock-in. The UK government has faced issues associated with the AWS vendor lock-in dilemma. Reports have also pointed out vendor lock-in issues within the United States Government.
Governments are acknowledging the importance of level playing fields. This can change how closed ecosystems are viewed, and can pave paths for open source software to be much more widely adopted. Legal action against such lock-in practices will definitely be a defining factor of this tussle, and antitrust groups are increasing their focus on these these gatekeepers.
AI: The new frontier
In May 2024, both Google and Microsoft have upped the ante within the AI race. This race only seems to heat up, building even more lock-in than before.
OpenAI unveiled its new GPT-4o model, which supports multimodal data (text, images, video) natively instead of spreading the work around multiple models. This allows for much better response quality than GPT-4. Notably, OpenAI revealed an application that can look at the user’s screen and help them with code and other tasks. Such an interface brings the AI experience directly to the user’s system, a completely new way to interact with an AI model.
Not to be outdone, Google soon kicked off IO 2024 with a volley of new AI products. They launched new versions of Gemini and Google’s Veo clashed with OpenAI’s Sora for the video generation vertical, while Gemini shows up in Project IDX, their online VSCode competitor, which itself is backed by GitHub’s Copilot.
A very interesting aspect of all these launches was how close the AI models would be to the user, and how deeply they’d be integrated into Google’s ecosystem. Gemini now directly integrates with Gmail, the most popular email client in the world. Project Astra, a Google Glass-esque AI assistant that can see the world, would directly integrate with a proprietary glasses device and Google Phones (it seems like it could be a replacement to Google Assistant). Google’s Gemini will also be very tightly coupled with Google’s Search and Photos. Google Phones will now come with Gemini models baked directly into the system locally.
Your choice of ecosystem or products will now dictate which AI model you can use. Don’t like Gemini for search? Bing seems like the only option with OpenAI’s models. Don’t like Github Copilot and want to use Google’s models? You’ll have to ditch VSCode and embrace Project IDX for that to happen. This is how Microsoft (along with OpenAI) and Google are ensuring the widespread usage of their models: if you want to use their products, you’ll have to work with their models, and if you want to use their models, you can only do so on their products. This split is present within Outlook vs Gmail, Word vs Docs and as previously mentioned, Project IDX vs VSCode (Copilot does have plugins for other editors though).
This is a classic case of building technological moats. This time around, it’s much more blunt and “Cold War”-esque. If OpenAI’s models dominate Gemini technologically, Google Search is likely to lose users to Bing (this is already happening) and if Gemini can overpower OpenAI’s models, Word might lose users to Google Docs. The expectation currently is that this war will continue, separating the two ecosystems more and more. Other providers like Anthropic will not be able to use these channels to monetize their creations.
Microsoft recently revealed a Copilot+ PC, with their own proprietary model baked into the operating system itself. This is probably as locked-in as you can be with a vendor.
The AI race seems to be headed towards a multi-polar world, where a few key large language model providers would control most of the market, while different systems affiliated with each side will be extremely opinionated.
The Verdict
Vendor lock-in is not going anywhere anytime soon. It is under immense pressure and scrutiny though. Apple’s app market might open up soon. More open source tools are making their way into the cloud stack.
While in most spaces they are under attack, gatekeepers thrive within the AI race.
Yet, the sands are shifting. The future is exciting.
A Note of Thanks
Thanks for reading this article! Takes quite some time and energy from my side. Do send any feedback you have for this article. Until next time.
