Quoting Chamath on the rationale for the Facebook Platform is like quoting the current management of Boeing on how to build a plane. If you want the real story on the dynamics behind the Platform, and why it worked so incredibly well when it did, you’d have to talk to Dave Morin, but I’m not sure he’d like to revisit that period in his life. Dave’s open, humble approach (something I think he’d picked up at Apple) attracted the best and brightest companies and programmers to the platform, and gave them the confidence needed to invest in building a presence there. Eventually a bunch of people inside of Facebook got jealous of the attention he was getting and had him demoted.
Chamath takeover and his self-dealing (investing in platform companies while overseeing it? really?) was a large part of the Platform’s failure, not its success. People lost confidence, and confidence is the one thing that every platform — whether it’s a piece of software, or a country’s economy — really runs on. If you want to talk about platforms, and what they are, and what they aren’t, that’s really all it is. People who bring up a million other things and a random Bill Gates quote don’t know what they’re talking about.
Apple is strict and super-weird about some of their rules, but they’re consistent. And it’s in that consistency that they’ve been able to build a large, dominant platform. When people start to see cracks in that consistency — such as the recent Hey drama — both developers AND people within the company immediately freak out, and some statement is made (whether it’s what the developers want to hear is another matter). They’re also super consistent with most of their APIs and their timetables, which further encourages investment.
Facebook is pretty much the exact opposite of this, in every aspect of their business. Whether you’re a newspaper or an Instagram model or a developer, you’re never quite sure where you stand. While things built on top of Facebook might have large-scale near-term value, nobody’s planning their next decade on there (even if suspicious can’t-let-China-win government meddling and the Silicon Valley oligarchy keep them on top for that long).