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Being Someone Else's Bitch, Being Your Own Bitch... Or Making Others Your Bitch (techdirt.com)
13 points by peter123 on June 3, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments



There is no "platform" lesson here. The lesson is not to adopt risky business "models" based on wishful thinking. In one case, don't compete directly with the platform provider -- in the other case, it was never really a "platform" to begin with.

If I make a mobile app for wide distribution, I will probably confine myself to iPhone, because it will make me more money for less hassle than Android. I don't expect Apple to pull the rug out for under me in most cases, because I don't expect to compete with them directly.

If I'm selling a mobile app which acts as a book store, I would be dumb. Why? Well, the most prominent is that you're directly competing with Apple's own application released from Day One of it's book format device. Unless you're a large company with bargaining power (e.g. Netflix, Amazon), it will not go well...

Similarly with all the drama about the Twitter API. Twitter is not a platform. 99% of the complainers, well they're making Twitter clients. That's it. They are taking twitter's data and displaying it slightly differently(?[1]). They aren't creating anything new, or particularly original, sorry. Once a couple good clients came out, the game was over, and Twitter purchased one as the canonical version. In this case, you're in early or you don't go in.

[1] Most of them, tellingly, I have a hard time seeing the difference between.


A comparison between companies and how they've dealt with bitch-slapping their bitches would be interesting.




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