Technology Ecosystems: Creating Brand Fanatics

The world as we currently know it has arrived at a time where technology is essential to daily life, everything needs to be “smart” to make our day to day easier. It is no longer sufficient to simply have a smartphone (which now rarely anyone even calls it that, they simply call it a phone) but we also need to have smart lighting, smart speakers, smart TV’s and the list goes on. With these new tendencies, technology giants have come to produce their own “smart” products, and along with those, creating what we have come to know as an ecosystem.

What is an ecosystem? Well Merriam-Webster dictionary defines an ecosystem as: “a whole group of living and nonliving things that make up an environment and affect each other.” So by this definition we can safely say that by being a consumer of certain technological products, we belong to a technological ecosystem, interacting with hardware and software on a daily basis.

Now that we have that out of the way, what ecosystem would you say you belong to? If you said either Google or Apple, you are correct. Most users of any smartphone, be it iPhone, Samsung, Huawei, LG, etc. will encounter two operating systems for smartphone, iOS or Android.

Both Google and Apple have been creating products for their respective environments and here we will go over the most important:

• Apps: what we have come to know as software is a big part of the environment. Both offer to cover basics necessities of a user.

• Video streaming: with the age of streaming services, being able to stream from your devices to your TV is a must, some smart TV’s come with this perk but for those that don’t, hardware is available. Google offers the Chromecast and Apple has the Apple TV.
• Headphones: now that we have personal assistants at our disposal, there needs to be an easier way to access them. By voice commands of course and what better way then wearable hardware in the form of headphones: Apple Airpods and Google Pixel Buds.
• Speakers: but what if we do not want to have our assistant around our necks or in our ears? Well there are speakers to help you with that: Google Home and Apple’s Homepod.
• Smartwatch: who wouldn’t like to know how many steps you have taken from your desk and the bathroom or what your heart rate is when your boss calls you in to his/her office? Apple has you covered with their Apple Watch and Google (with the help of other manufactures) has Android Wear.

Well with all the hardware and software at our disposal, we should be able to choose what we want from each product line and that way we don’t have to choose between ecosystems correct? Partially. Although some of what Apple and Google have made available are compatible with each other, they lack some of the most important parts of the product itself. For example, the Apple Airpods are not the greatest Bluetooth headphones but when paired with an Apple product (iPhone or iMac), they unlock their potential with Siri assistance and easy pairing across all Apple products once paired.

Why do they do this you may ask? Why not allow their consumers choose their preferred product? The answer is simple, the technological ecosystem. By making a product work exceptionally with other products of the same brand, you are making the consumer buy within the existing ecosystem whenever they want to buy something like a new smartwatch or Bluetooth headphones. Of course it’s not all bad, they have done an exceptional job at making your workflow across hardware a lot easier through Cloud Services, keeping all of your information synced so you can jump from one device to another, so there’s that.

Undoubtedly, this has played a fundamental role in turning these two giants into some of the most admired brands in the world with millions and millions of fans. Have you thought about the advantages that your brand can take advantage of to create an efficient ecosystem around it?

Erik Torres is a Full-Stack Developer at Mijo! Brands, a creative digital marketing agency with offices in Mexico City, Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta. 

Erik is web developer by day, and summoner on Summoner’s Rift by night. When he’s not destroying noobs and flaming his teammates while playing League of Legends, you can find him hard at work making the world a more awesome place one line of code at a time. He sees web development as a modern form of art, where each pixel has its own purpose and meaning to the whole that is a website. As a fan of beautifully designed API’s, always look to make the cleanest and most legible backend possible to the point where a variable can become your whole website. Arrays, variables and objects are a weapon of mass construction put in to the right hands.