Friction in the Value Chain

In September 2011 Mark Zuckerberg used the term “frictionless” to describe Facebook’s newly launched Timeline. It seemed wholly appropriate for where technology is going: “Friction” is “resistance” and technology has always sought improve efficiency and productivity. Frictionless innovation promises more with less work, both in the workplace and in our personal lives, through simplicity, centralization, and connectedness. We now accept “frictionless” as being an inherently “good” quality while “friction” is seen as “bad.”

However, only a year after Zuckerberg’s announcement, Facebook responded to user complaints about timeline and abandoned it. The frictionless timeline tracked and published nearly everything Facebook members were doing without providing control to the user or context to their friends. Facebook forgot that their primary value to users was allowing them to curate, edit, and enhance their “reality” on their own time in their own way.

Nicholas Carr, whose new book The Glass Cage provides a social critique of the current trend towards frictionless automation, explained in a recent interview, “we have this sense of convenience and efficiency… that we can do things better just by pulling out a smartphone or a computer and, as people in Silicon Valley like to say, remove the friction from our lives…. [However, friction] is where a lot of the fulfillment in our lives comes from….” Frictionless proponents often equate speed and ease with quality and value. But anyone facing the prospect of a drive-thru dinner might argue that speed doesn’t always equal quality. This disconnect reveals the nature of the frictionless paradox.

Still, the promotion of frictionless experiences persists courtesy of companies that lean on them most — platforms. As they explained in their book How Google Works, Google executives Eric Schmidt and Michael Rosenberg stated: “The Corporation as a hub of economic activity is being challenged by The Platform.” A December 2014 piece by Fortune’s Alan Murray describes platforms as “[c]ompanies that combine the characteristics of firms and markets” by “supporting, shaping, and creating a new marketplace.”

Murray’s article also spotlights the most appealing feature of platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon to the investor class: “[t]he growth rates of these platform businesses are phenomenal.” As Schmidt and Rosenberg repeatedly remind us “growth and scale, not revenue, are the determining factors in the way they make decisions.” In October 2014 Mark Zuckerberg set a high bar for platform growth when he stated that platform businesses only become interesting when they have at least 1 billion users.

While platforms continue with frictionless methods to quickly add millions of users, Facebook’s Timeline misstep revealed how, in practice, frictionless experiences often create a tension between the platform and its users. Alongside our innate desire for simplicity and ease lies a growing understanding of what is lost when we realize it. We connect more easily, yet we are often left more isolated. We can find anything, yet we are stuck in the familiar. We can share everything, yet we are now craving privacy.

This user tension caused by frictionless can be counteracted through friction. Nicholas Carr explains how “constantly coming up against friction and resistance [,things such as]… building friendships,.. are very important to the richness of our lives.” Perhaps realizing this truth, Facebook took a half step towards friction a mere 6 months after Timeline debuted.

In early 2012, Facebook bought Instagram, the first of a flurry of other Facebook acquisitions. By October 2014, Zuckerberg explained that Facebook was no longer one brand functioning as a frictionless center of all its users’ needs. Instead, “Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp and Search” represented Facebook’s “next generation of services” designed to help “connect billions of people and become important businesses in their own right.”

Beyond buying new users or buying out competitors, Facebook’s acquisition strategy signified the abandonment of their “centralized social media landscape” with “frictionless” characteristics. Facebook replaced this with multi-node friction, the stickiness inherent in navigating between different apps and experiences. By remaining as standalone brands that focus on specific user needs, Instagram and Whatsapp (and even the newly announced extension Facebook Work) create value for Facebook by giving it new friction points to grow user numbers and user diversity while also providing resistance against losing overall users under the larger Facebook umbrella.

Now that they’ve embraced friction’s value to their own businesses, the next evolution for platforms may be a willingness to embrace friction’s value outside of their corporate umbrella. After all, platforms may create their own markets, but these markets still are part of a larger value chain, which requires the adoption and the cooperation of others beyond platform users including outside, but necessary, third parties.

In addition to the tension between frictionless platforms and their users, there is a growing tension between platforms and their necessary third party partners. For Amazon, it lies with authors and publishers. For Spotify, it is the musicians whose work represents the platform’s lifeblood. For Uber, it is local governments, taxi companies, and sometimes even their own drivers. Though they often explain away this tension as “disruption” or with sarcastic references to buggy whips, these platforms still need these third parties’ cooperation to have success.

While a new generation of platforms like Spotify and Uber struggle with the balance between frictionless experiences and value for their suppliers along the value chain, Netflix may provide a model for the future. Netflix’s successful evolution from a cord-cutting competitor to traditional broadcast models to a respected, valued partner in content creation and distribution suggests that platforms might do well to take a step back from their growth-centered focus and recognize that there is value to them in adding or enhancing friction points that often lie outside their walls.

While market success explains why platforms hunger for constant and robust growth, it also brings the frictionless paradox into sharper focus. Everything can be made easily available through frictionless experiences, deep and lasting value is often created only through scarcity, discovery, effort, in short: friction.

Jim Markel is the Founder and CEO of Swampland Media, a southern culture marketing and media production company. While working as a journalist writing about American musical traditions, he discovered and managed the Grammy-nominated artist Robert Randolph and now continues to advise and assist artists and musicians in the digital age.

Geordie McClelland is a Founder of altr experience design. He’s been a marketing and strategic advisor to companies including The Coca-Cola Company, Thompson Reuters, The McGraw-Hill Company, MINI/BMW, Sprint, athenahealth, TripAdvisor, and Cablevision.

Writing together in 2009, Markel and McClelland coined the term “the emotionally connected network” to describe the new way to create value in the changing world of media.