This doesn't seem like a failing of the free market. The free market has already created products that solved this problem, and they are some of the most popular products in history, but people are moving off of them, e.g.:
- People are moving from Microsoft Office to Google Docs
- Designers are moving from Sketch/Photoshop/Illustrator to Figma
- People are moving from Evernote/Text Files/Whatever to Notion
- People are moving from HTML files to Webflow
- People have already moved from native mail clients to Gmail
There's a problem here, but it isn't that the free market hasn't solved this problem, it's that people are choosing other features (mainly collaboration) as more important than data ownership.
Note that this is a transition mainly driven by tech people, none of these products have gone mainstream yet (excluding Gmail of course), and the products that offer data ownership are still far more popular overall. But if the mainstream follows tech peoples lead, that won't be for long.
- People are moving from Microsoft Office to Google Docs
- Designers are moving from Sketch/Photoshop/Illustrator to Figma
- People are moving from Evernote/Text Files/Whatever to Notion
- People are moving from HTML files to Webflow
- People have already moved from native mail clients to Gmail
There's a problem here, but it isn't that the free market hasn't solved this problem, it's that people are choosing other features (mainly collaboration) as more important than data ownership.
Note that this is a transition mainly driven by tech people, none of these products have gone mainstream yet (excluding Gmail of course), and the products that offer data ownership are still far more popular overall. But if the mainstream follows tech peoples lead, that won't be for long.