Today’s super-apps like Alipay, Grab and Gojek are amazing platforms. They are super-platforms. They can add all sorts of additional services - adjacent services - because they bring the customer to one place (their platform) and use the data from one service to enable the second.
Platform data hoarding is indeed bad for the economy. In their paper on “The Data Economy: Market Size and Global Trade” for the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (part of the UK's National Institute of Economic and Social Research), Diane Coyle and Wendy Li talk about the growing "data gap" and argue that this data gap is a a barrier to entry that affects not only businesses but also aggregate innovation, investment and trade:Large data holdings, rich in volume and variety, thus give large online platforms a significant competitive advantage, powered by network effects and the virtuous cycle between data and the AI algorithms improving the services and increasing revenues.This advantage means that platforms obtain insights about adjacent sectors and can then enter them more easily. Potential new competitors without access to that data and the advantages it confers therefore struggle to enter new markets.
We at shovel.company is building for this. Love to talk to you more on this.
Platform data hoarding is indeed bad for the economy. In their paper on “The Data Economy: Market Size and Global Trade” for the Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (part of the UK's National Institute of Economic and Social Research), Diane Coyle and Wendy Li talk about the growing "data gap" and argue that this data gap is a a barrier to entry that affects not only businesses but also aggregate innovation, investment and trade:Large data holdings, rich in volume and variety, thus give large online platforms a significant competitive advantage, powered by network effects and the virtuous cycle between data and the AI algorithms improving the services and increasing revenues.This advantage means that platforms obtain insights about adjacent sectors and can then enter them more easily. Potential new competitors without access to that data and the advantages it confers therefore struggle to enter new markets.