Estratégia em todo lado - não é winner-take-all

Ando a dar uma vista de olhos a "Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms" de David S. Evans e Richard Schmalensee.

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A investigação já compensou!

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Descobri algo que questionava interiormente já há algum tempo e que não vi ainda referido em lado nenhum. A primeira vez que equacionei o tema foi por causa da língua inglesa, talvez em 2001: quanto mais pessoas usam a língua inglesa como língua franca, mais a língua inglesa fica atraente para os falantes que aprendam inglês. No último ano o tema voltou a interessar-me por causa da Uber e das plataformas funcionarem como winner-take-all:

"It soon became apparent that much of the received wisdom about network effects was wrong. The first-mover advantage and winner-take-all theories, for example, were shaky at best.
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The largest credit card network, Visa, expanded nationally sixteen years after the first national card network. We can’t think of many multisided platform industries where the first mover won it all. In fact, for most industries with indirect network effects, the first movers mostly died and few remember them.
There are some important industries where “winner takes most” may apply. But even there, victory is likely to be more transient than economists and pundits once thought.
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Economists missed the fact that matchmakers, just like any other businesses, can differentiate themselves.[Moi ici: Isto é muito bom]
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Participants can, and often do, use several platforms—a practice that the old network effects literature dismissed. The new economics of multisided platforms calls this multihoming. Most people use and most merchants accept several different brands of payment cards, for instance.
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Economists also recognize now that the extent to which indirect network effects could be reversed varies across industries. They had focused on businesses in which people had to make a significant financial commitment to a new technology such as a fax machine or a video game console. Once a network business of that sort got someone on board using its standard, it didn’t have to worry much about losing that person. For many matchmaker businesses, however, participants can easily decide to switch. People commonly stop going to a mall and retailers commonly decide not to renew their leases there."