Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raganwald | Hacker News Reader

I like everything about the post except for the word "platform." That is an overly broad word that does mean web browsers and the Internet itself and electricity. I prefer the phrase Proprietary Platform, because the issue is one of control.

If a single vendor gains control of the "market" for web browsers, as Microsoft did for a while, you are at their mercy. If there are multiple, competing web browsers and control of the APIs (e.g. HTML, CSS, JS) is decentralized, you are at the mercy of the whims of the marketplace, but no one person can wake up in the morning and decide to shut you out.

The concerns raised in this post are isomorphic to Apple's concerns about Flash. They don't mind developers using web standards to develop apps because no one vendor controls HTML, CSS, and JS. If developers write their apps in HTML, JS, and CSS, Adobe cannot flip a switch overnight and break every app on iPhone because their proprietary tools no longer emit a flavour of JS that runs on iPhone without errors.

So...

Proprietary Platforms are for Suckers.

I'd say the true target of this criticism is content-aware platforms, as opposed to content-neutral platforms, which I believe are what people often mean when they talk about "closed" and "open" platforms. The author favorably mentions targeting Windows and Mac OS, which certainly are proprietary, but they do not restrict the user of any content, essentially dumb pipes from hardware to content; these content-neutral platforms would be OK to build a business on. Platforms mentioned as bad were the iPhone, Twitter and Facebook, platforms where the vendor can and does restrict their users' access to content via arbitrary changes to their usage licenses, and such content-aware platforms are shaky grounds to build a business on.

Well, MacOS and Windows may be "content-neutral" in a certain sense but historically both vendors have gone into competition with developers... So from my perspective "proprietary" means sleeping with an 800lb. gorilla, and all we are debating is whether the gorilla wants to eat you or simply rolled over in their sleep and crushed you by accident.

http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/

The lesson I took away from Panic's Audion story is that they got gridlocked while trying to play two potential buyers (AOL and Apple), and Apple ended up moving forward with a less encumbered competitor. Please correct me if I am wrong, but it sounds like Panic wanted to get eaten by an 800lb. gorilla.

Oh? I think they wanted to get rich, but not to sell out:

In fact, I'd say that almost 5 minutes after the meeting Steve and I knew in our hearts that it wasn't time — that we didn't want to join Apple (yet). We maybe went through the motions of "deciding" on the flight back home, but I think we knew the truth. And the truth went something like this:

"This is our only chance to do Panic. We don't have kids, we're not married, we don't have huge obligations. We didn't invest our life savings into it, just a few hundred dollars. We don't even have life savings. We probably won't get this opportunity again in our lifetime — the full chance to take a complete risk, to experiment, quit our day jobs, start a business that certainly may fail, put our hearts into the soul of it, and try to make it fly — making the best possible Macintosh software we can without the threat of mortgages or the cost of braces or kids wondering why we're never home. And while there may be a time in our life where we crave some stability, or there may be a time in our life when things don't work out with Panic and we return to be a player in a larger, awesome team like Apple, that time is certainly not now. Panic's time is."

post scriptum: Whether Panic wanted to sell or not, the fact remains that building on a proprietary platform is perilous. Some people may still want to do so, but this is analogous to pointing out that BASE jumping is thrilling and deeply satisfying.

We can agree that Panic did consider a sale to AOL and Apple without taking anything away from the fact that a content-neutral proprietary platform still carries the risk that you will wake up one morning to discover that the vendor is giving away competition.

There's a huge difference between someone competing against you in the marketplace (yes, including with free offerings), and that same someone rejecting your iPhone app and preventing you from distributing it entirely. The risks are of different orders of magnitude.

If developing for Windows is an order of magnitude safer than developing for iPhone, how many orders of magnitude is developing for the web safer than developing for Windows?

I think the risks vary from platform to platform, market to market, and even possibly from executive making the decision to executive making the decision.

What are the risks of Apple competing with or even rejecting iDeco, an iPhone application for estimating decompression diving profiles? Minimal. Does that weaken the argument that building on a proprietary platform places you at Apple's mercy? I don't think so.

It's true that with iDeco they could reject it whereas with VPlanner desktop software they can only give away free decompression software. But this is like arguing the difference between living with a school principal who can expel you vs. a bully who can beat you up at recess.

If school looks good to you, go and enjoy yourself. The fundamental situation remains that when you build on a proprietary platform you expose yourself to risk of harm from the vendor. Manage that risk wisely and keep your eyes open.

> how many orders of magnitude is developing for the web safer than developing for Windows?

Depends on the primary source of your visitors/customers. If that's Google (as is the case with many web companies) then they could introduce a service much like yours and direct people there instead.

I think another important distinction is who is really dependent on whom. Are your success contingent on their them, and/or is their success contingent on you?

For example, Ventrilo was free to raise their rates because their success and profits really weren't dependent on the profits of the end users. They could jack their prices all over the place and most of their customers would have to pay if they wanted to keep their business going. They had lock in and they used it. They really don't care about how your company does, just that they extract maximum profit from you.

On the other hand, a company like Google has its success and profits dependent on your website being awesome. The more people who use the web and the more time they spend on it the more money Google will make. Google wants your site to succeed because it makes them money in the long run. They won't be as interested in jerking you around because they're not making money directly from you.

> Are your success contingent on their them, and/or is their success contingent on you?

This is the right question to ask. If A depends on B, but B doesn't depend on A, then B might shaft A. But if A and B are mutually dependent, both can assume it's unlikely the other with shaft them.

It still happens, though. See: Facebook and Zynga.

Or rather the advice should be not to build on top of a single platform. Building an API aggregator for example would be relatively safe since losing the functionality of a single API has reduced risk. And really in the case of browsers this is what we're doing already. If Microsoft decides to pull away from the standard there is pressure from developers since we are not at the mercy of IE.

It is funny that Windows is a proprietary platform and nobody (government) ever allowed them this kind of control/restriction.

Now Apple/Twitter/Facebook is going crazy and nobody does nothing...

The US vs. Microsoft case started in 1998 [1], but the investigation started all the way back in 1991. Given that the DOJ has just initiated an investigation into Apple over possible antitrust violations in online music sales [2], we can expect to maybe see a case in 2017 or so...

That said, there are many difference between the Windows platform and the iPhone. When the DOJ started investigating Microsoft in 1991 they did have a monopoly on PC operating systems, and (as the DOJ investigation found) was using this power to unfairly give Internet Explorer an edge.

The iPhone platform may command the lion's share of the attention in the smartphone market, it is nowhere near a monopoly [3, 4]. The same cannot be said about the iTunes Music Store [5]. It seems, however, that the investigation into Apple's practices are moving beyond music [6], so we'll see in 7 years time about "does nothing".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft [2] http://topnews.us/content/221070-apple-under-doj-investigati... [3] http://mashable.com/2010/02/09/android-iphone-market-share/ [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone [5] http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/04/03itunes.html [6] http://newsblog.thecmuwebsite.com/post/DOJs-Apple-investigat...

[Hope this wasn't too citation heavy, I tend to get a bit verbose when I am tired.]

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