Co-existing with platform vendorsWednesday, April 04, 2007 by Dave Winer. My experience with platform vendors... 1. I have been a platform vendor. 2. I had to live within the platform of a huge vendor. 3. I observed up-close how huge vendors dealt with developers in platforms I didn't develop for.
From the developer's perspective: How can I choose a niche that's either not likely to interest the vendor, or one that's likely to get me acquired by the vendor or another big company with lots of money who wants to make trouble for the vendor (in the latter case, Microsoft on the Mac in the mid-late 80s is a good example). Sometimes developers choose a niche that's either directly in the path of the vendor, or even worse, on the roadmap of the vendor. In those cases, they don't really deserve our sympathy. It's almost like a game of PR, there's no way you're not going to have a fight on your hands. The various vendors of widget environments on the Mac come to mind. The issues are so thorny and so impossible to solve that I came around to the opinion that the only solution was to get rid of the idea of platform vendors altogther, and see the Internet as the platform without a platform vendor. That actually seems to be working! I tried to help RSS be such a platform, and so far it's resisted various attempts by technology companies to turn it into something they control, where one vendor can crush anyone that enters their eminent domain.
8/22/95: What is a Platform? Just some thoughts from a guy whose been around this block a number of times. |