

Attack of the Platform Holders - twidlit

Apple has overplayed its dictatorship, Twitter bought Tweetie, Facebook is pushing its own credit system. Is this the evolution or devolution of tech platforms? thoughts?
======
nostrademons
It's consolidation. It's the same thing that happened to the web browser
market as first Netscape and then IE dominated the browser was. The same thing
as when Apple and IBM-and-clones basically divided the PC market and forced
out all the other early entrants.

It sucks if you're one of the also-ran platforms, it sucks if you developed
for one of the also-ran platforms, and it means you have dramatically less
bargaining power if you're developing for one of the winning platforms. (OTOH,
it's pretty nice if you're bought by one of the winning platforms.) I wouldn't
worry about it too much in terms of the long-term evolution of tech platforms,
though. Historically, each major consolidation of platforms has laid the
groundwork for the adoption of the next big platform. The web would never have
caught on if Netscape had needed to support, well, these:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_home_computers> instead of just
Windows/Mac/Linux. Then today's Web 2.0 apps like Facebook and Twitter would
never have caught on if they had to support all the early browsers in addition
to IE & Firefox. Similarly, I bet this consolidation of web & mobile platforms
lays the groundwork for some platform that replaces them all.

------
stevenwei
The problem is that these platforms have gotten so big that it's hard to
directly compete against them.

Instead, developers have decided to join them, knowing full well that the
platform owners hold all the marbles and can yank the rug out from under you
at any time.

What's interesting to me is that Apple is getting lambasted over their 'closed
platform', but we can clearly see with Twitter and Facebook that the 'open
web' suffers similar problems when you build to someone else's platform.

