When there is a centralized organization, it is relatively easy to get ducks in a row and heading in the same direction through various internal processes. This is of course very necessary as there are limited resources available to use and, there is often little room for error which in turn means, very little room for autonomy of action. However, there is not much responsibility laying upon employees who are often just happy to turn up and get paid regardless of quality of work put in or need for that work as if the company fails, they will lose their job, not their investments.
This means that the direction a company takes attempts to be as good as possible in satisfying the needs of the company which generally means, satisfying investors. Getting the direction right is important and missteps can cost the company everything.
While in a decentralized open environment it is notoriously difficult to get consensus on contentious issues, there are also advantages in the system when it comes to the process of trial and error as essentially anyone can take a path of their choosing. On Steem this is not only the way one uses Steem but also, the way one develops on Steem so that anyone who wants to try something can try and on Steem, they are likely to even get some support along the way if members of the community find the ideas and development path compelling enough.
Steem of many worlds
Steem is a content delivery blockchain that stores all data upon it and can be leveraged by applications in a wide array of patterns that utilize the information. Everything on the blockchain is readable but how they are are chosen and combined to provide a view is up to the various applications that leverage the Steem blockchain. And, the type of content use case that is being written to the blockchain is changing too.
Essentially all of the applications on Steem are developed by private people who want to be able to create something wither for themselves or a community to utilize in various ways. It doesn't matter if it is an interface for viewing, a game or a VR world, all of it is possible to develop. While not all of them will be successful and none of them are guaranteed success in any way, there will be some that are likely to be very valuable assets on the Steem blockchain in time.
Organic fractals
The way a decentralized environment works is unlike the centralized retarded cousin that has to get the direction right in order to succeed. A decentralized environment is more like an organic structure that not only grows, but adapts and mutates as needs arise. The needs on the Steem blockchain could be the demands of consumers, the requirements from investors, the desires of contributors or, just the playing around of developers trying to do something cool. Most likely though, it is a constant development that factors in all pieces simultaneously making it a highly diversified and complex organism with many faces and in the case of Steem, the potential for fingers in every content pie.
If we consider how many mobile apps there are and how many of them actually make significant amounts of money, the odds are definitely stacked against striking it rich as a mobile app company. But on Steem, all of those apps whether immensely successful or not are, on Steem. What this means is that even if some fail, a decent success of one still provides value and, the ones that ail might lose their investment in time and energy but could actually have made some Steem along the way to benefit from other's success and perhaps start afresh.
Providing options for more
No one knows what is going to make Steem popular and, no one knows what in ten years is going to keep it there but in a distributed and diverse network on a single chain, trends in consumer behavior as well as communication of development can increase odds of success for individual internal projects as well as increase the value of the chain for all users of that chain.
The Steem blockchain is much like the internet itself in the fact that it doesn't matter what travels along it to be successful, as long as it does move transactions that people want it to move. The difference is that instead of being the internet owned by telecommunication companies and governments, it s owned by the collective users themselves, right down to the Resource Credits needed for delivering bandwidth.
The community is not only the owner of the Steem blockchain network, it is also the developer of it, the contributor to it and the consumer of it to a large extent. With so many people and various desires, it is going to fractal out into the world in many different kinds of ways to the point where one Steem application user might not recognize that another application they come across is powered by Steem underneath. This means that Steem itself loses importance in the public eye but, the applications become the driver of value.
Site unseen
This then means that the eventual value of Steem is going to likely be influenced by factors and applications that the average user has no perspective or knowledge on at all as a wildly successful application might be of no interest to a lot of users. For example, I am not interested in gambling but, I don't mind people on Steem using the blockchain to develop, serve and play gambling games as not only do I believe they are free to do so, it doesn't stop me doing what I want to do on the chain either. We can live in different Steem worlds and still be connected by a single pool of content.
The Steem multiverse, the Steemiverse isn't tied to finding the right way forward as it is able to support the simultaneous development of all kinds of individuals and groups who want to leverage the Steem blockchain to build upon and utilize in any number of ways. There are massive benefits to develop on Steem and with the coming Steem.DAO in development by 
Good things, small packages
The other thing through these various developments is that it not only gives a greater chance of creating that killer sticky application, it gives many applications a chance of success across a spectrum. In a decentralized environment like Steem, not every app needs to be very successful as long as enough are somewhat successful. People seem to think that unless a startup breaks a billion, it is a failure but that is very far from the truth.
A company can be highly successful and stay small, stay niche and almost unknown and still make a decent income for those involved and serve a very good product to their customers. Through development, Steem will increasingly be able to house a host of such companies, organisations and users who are able to help Steem be successful in an out of sight manner. While individual use cases can stay small, the Steem network they leverage can be immense.
Increasingly providing
There is a lot of focus put on users and contributors in the moment but the more that Steem develops its applications, the more empowered and rewarded those same users are likely to become as in time, there will be a much better range of ways that are suitable to an increasingly inclusive set of skills. The alignment issue I have spoken of is expecting it to be able to deliver everything immediately without development into the infrastructure needed to do so. This means that the more development done now, the faster individual and groups will be able to use Steem in the way they want to use it.
With all the things that are going on at the moment and all of the applications that are driving users back and forth and making them split their time and resources, the more encouraged I am for the future of Steem. There are so many opportunities that have been created so far and there are more and more coming all the time yet, so many people are worried that they missed the boat or, they aren't getting a large enough piece of the pie. The pie is the current pie, it is only going to get larger in value over time.
Your thoughts and actions are your own, the life you experience is a consequence of them.
Taraz
[ a Steem original ]