There are a number of great lessons we can learn from Steve Jobs, but this week (at the WWDC 2011 conference) he has left us with arguably one of the most valuable: Do not build on rented land.
A number of startups this week are sitting around looking at one another and asking themselves what they should be doing next. They are doing this because Apple in one sweep cloned all their features into the new iOS update. Everything from Dropbox to Instapaper have now essentially been rendered redundant on Apple devices.
Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
In the 80’s the world witnessed the rise of the tech giant Microsoft, and by the 90’s as the web emerged as the future of technology and an essential new frontier to conquer. The web browser Netscape ran on the Microsoft platform, but to Microsoft they needed to dominate this new arena. Microsoft quickly launched the now infamous Internet Explorer, they bundled it in together with their operating system free of charge. This essentially crushed Netscape and other browsers at the time trying to compete. Microsoft was also accused of changing their API to give competition a hard time. This ordeal almost meant the end of Microsoft as the US government took them to court for abusing their monopoly.
Since the days of Bill Gates ruthlessly killing competitors in this way, not much has changed… The difference now is that it’s easier to get away with it. No longer do platform owners need to explicitly package a disc into the bag of software they sold in stores. The crime now happens through a simple download or a tweaking on their servers.
“œWriting desktop software has become a lot less fun. If you want to write desktop software now you do it on their terms, calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS. And if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for them.“ – Paul Graham (Y Combinator)
Do not build on rented land
Building on someone else’s platform at the end of the day is like building on rented land – you can find yourself having invested tons of resources into something that you do not own and ultimately have no control over. The irony is that in technology, if you are doing very well on someone else’s platform you are most in danger of getting the worst deal. Because if you do well on someones’ platform it means you are filling a gap that the platform owners have an interest in filling themselves.
It happens all the time and on all platforms, think for a second about Twitter. Look at how them launching a retweet button rendered the efforts of TweetMeme wasted and them introducing photos into the stream killed off TwitPic’s hopes and dreams for the future. Something as simple as altering the API call limit can kill off hundreds of clients and apps that depend on Twitter for their bread and butter.
Conclusion
Let’s wake up to the reality that ultimately platform owners are not really your friends, they are your future competitors. Start building applications that are less platform dependent and offer value above and beyond just filling a feature gap.
