For a use case to be viable today, the user has to give it the data it needs to operate.
Today the unit of computation is the app.
The user has to be comfortable giving the app the data it needs to do the use case.
That requires a viable business model to exist for the app to be viable.
That's a very high bar!
Imagine a power-law curve of all conceivable use cases.
Only the ones that are extremely valuable, say the top 1%, are above the bar of being important enough to get over the "an app is worth it" hump.
But there's a huge tail of plausible use cases that are not viable.
So much value that is not created!
Every new use case today has a cold start problem.
As a user, you have to hope that either:
1) An app you already use and has the data decides to add the incremental use case.
But as the app gets more bloated and complex, and the org that produces it gets more bloated and complex, it gets harder and harder for the org to add incremental features to the app.
2) a new app will do it
But the app has to clear a very high cold start problem to get users to get over the hump of installing it and giving it data, and has to have a viable business model embedded.
In today's laws of physics, apps can't go where the data is, because data is kept inside the castle of the other origin.
So everyone competes to be the place where the data is.
But imagine if there was an ecosystem, and within it, each use case could operate over precisely the data it needed with no friction, safely, without any ability to use it for other purposes.
The ecosystem itself would have a large cold start problem, like any new app.
But every use case within the ecosystem–from any third party participating in it–would have significantly less of a cold start problem.
As more and more activity happened in the ecosystem (more use cases supported, more users with more data onboarded), the ecosystem would get more and more momentum.
Each new use case added to the ecosystem would make the incremental value of the ecosystem stronger, giving more of a pull for incremental users to be willing to jump in.
Every use case that works helps decrease the cold start problem for every other use case.
All of the momentum of all of the use cases in the ecosystem aggregated into the momentum of the collective ecosystem.
It would be wildly unlike the current world.
This ecosystem would have a massive moat.
Competing apps or ecosystems would have to overcome the significant amount of data momentum of the ecosystem.
And if the ecosystem were open, then it would make more sense to just join in, instead of trying to fight it.