If you build a business that relies on a single other player's API, you risk having them encroach on you when you become successful.
If you insist on never putting yourself at anyone's mercy (either by writing your tools from scratch or waiting until you have a cross-platform solution), you risk being trounced by someone else who does, or spreading yourself too thin and delivering a mediocre product.
The former concerns me; the latter terrifies me.
Countless people have become rich by building products that depend on one company's platform (think iPhone, Windows, Office, .NET, Facebook, etc). This post is just a reminder that it's not a panacea.
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I think the moral of this story is "don't build a business that relies on a single other players API." Talk about a single point of failure.
Every business takes risks.
If you build a business that relies on a single other player's API, you risk having them encroach on you when you become successful.
If you insist on never putting yourself at anyone's mercy (either by writing your tools from scratch or waiting until you have a cross-platform solution), you risk being trounced by someone else who does, or spreading yourself too thin and delivering a mediocre product.
The former concerns me; the latter terrifies me.
Countless people have become rich by building products that depend on one company's platform (think iPhone, Windows, Office, .NET, Facebook, etc). This post is just a reminder that it's not a panacea.
Google is NOT other player. They are the Internet
Going by that logic, I probably shouldn't be writing iPhone apps :)
BTW, Panic's Audion vs iTunes story seems similar from a tangent. http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/
Unless of course you build many businesses, so that any single one of them is not a single point of failure.