This is a really good article and I agree with a majority of the thesis. Basically, if you try to build a service on one of the major players platforms, you are susceptible to being cut off or damaged in one way or another. This occurred with Meerkat-Twitter, Zynga-Facebook, Demand Media-Google and many others.

However, it is possible to succeed. And the counterpoint is paypal and ebay. Most people don't remember that paypal was building their service inside of ebay and ebay was not at all friendly about it. In fact, ebay bought a rival payment company and tried to offer incentives to their sellers to switch from paypal. But paypal still won out. They key is to get major support from the platform's own users - like paypal did with ebay's sellers.

So it is possible to succeed on someone else's "p"latform.