Note that the 'textbook' examples of precommitment involve the burning-of-bridges or burning-of-ships-at-the-shore.
If there's any hope of an alternative to Facebook/Twitter at this point, given the incumbents' long head-starts, it's going to be a 'zag' to the incumbents' advertising-supported 'zig'. Caldwell might not have gone into his Facebook meeting fully intending that sort of confrontation... but by the time he left, the choices were stark.
I thus view Caldwell's anecdote not as a complaint, "boo-hoo I was wronged", but as him sharing a difficult lesson: that Facebook's model makes it impossible for Facebook to be a magnanimous platform steward. Perhaps Caldwell should have seen the writing on the wall earlier, but many exterior-platform shops are missing the same point, as evidenced by the surprise and indignation after each new consolidating move by the platform proprietors.
Perhaps Caldwell could have intuited the reality beforehand, and written about it in abstract terms. The anecdote illustrates the problem, in a way that far more independent developers will understand.
I fully understand breaking the rice pots and burning the boats, and I hope that you are right. However, his implementation doesn't create the developer education that you suggest. As they well should, young founders look up to guys like Dalton and may well take him at this word that Facebook's negotiating tactics are surprising. FB's stance on these issues are so ruthlessly consistent and well known that it's hard to even consider the specific tactics described as unethical.
I feel a responsibility to make it clear that such things are the norm and need to be accommodated in business planning and risk assessment from the beginning. Please note that I failed to do so the first time I dealt with Facebook, but that doesn't make it their fault -- rafer.net/post/168541483/lookeryupdate
Please also note, that I'd be damn excited for app.net's current iteration to take off and will go out of my way to use it if I can. I'd love a dev program that had ongoing stewardship built in, but no for-profit platform provider has ever made such a thing work over time.
I don't think that the key message is that FB's negotiating tactics are surprising. Whilst he was certainly surprised the point is surely that he was shocked because their behavior at the meeting was so at variance with what he had previously been led to believe. You say that FB's tactics are 'ruthlessly consistent' and 'well known' but this is surely a simplification. For example, the FB platform supports games but I am not aware of any instances in which FB has muscled in on a games dev.
I agree that it is helpful to point out that there are major risks when you develop for an alleged platform. But isn't that the point of his post?
I think the point of the app.net initiative is to create a platform that because of its different business model (subscription for infrastructure/service) will not suffer the conflicts that are inevitable when the business model is ads. And whilst this is indeed unusual lately, it is not long ago that such for-profit platforms were the norm. Older examples include, DOS, Windows, UNIX, Linux, X-Windows... More recently there is a profusion of companies providing commercial support for open source software or providing such software as a service.
Facebook has muscled in on literally everything but games, other than their ex poste facto 30% revenue share, and during their earnings report they intimated that they may get into games directly.
And, I'm shocked at your statement about the older platforms. I don't know if your entire background is on your LinkedIn page, but what you say is simply not true of Windows, DOS, the Mac, and is very tough to credit to Sun or SGI in their heydays. Those vendors cherry picked their ISVs all the time and with no more rhetorical consistency, stewardship, or charity than Dalton describes. They did so because they had market share in their segments and could.
That's why I specifically included this in my post: Playing naive to that reality went out the window in the mid-1980s with PC software and has been reproven by the platforms at least every 24 months since.
Everyone from RedHat to BeOS to Sega who behaved (somewhat) better did so because they needed their ecologies to grow. If they'd succeeded in building market share, I'm pretty sure I could predict their changes in policy.
Comments
I think to understand @daltonc's strategy with join.app.net, one should be familiar with Thomas Schelling's concept of 'precommitment':
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precommitment
Note that the 'textbook' examples of precommitment involve the burning-of-bridges or burning-of-ships-at-the-shore.
If there's any hope of an alternative to Facebook/Twitter at this point, given the incumbents' long head-starts, it's going to be a 'zag' to the incumbents' advertising-supported 'zig'. Caldwell might not have gone into his Facebook meeting fully intending that sort of confrontation... but by the time he left, the choices were stark.
I thus view Caldwell's anecdote not as a complaint, "boo-hoo I was wronged", but as him sharing a difficult lesson: that Facebook's model makes it impossible for Facebook to be a magnanimous platform steward. Perhaps Caldwell should have seen the writing on the wall earlier, but many exterior-platform shops are missing the same point, as evidenced by the surprise and indignation after each new consolidating move by the platform proprietors.
Perhaps Caldwell could have intuited the reality beforehand, and written about it in abstract terms. The anecdote illustrates the problem, in a way that far more independent developers will understand.
I fully understand breaking the rice pots and burning the boats, and I hope that you are right. However, his implementation doesn't create the developer education that you suggest. As they well should, young founders look up to guys like Dalton and may well take him at this word that Facebook's negotiating tactics are surprising. FB's stance on these issues are so ruthlessly consistent and well known that it's hard to even consider the specific tactics described as unethical.
I feel a responsibility to make it clear that such things are the norm and need to be accommodated in business planning and risk assessment from the beginning. Please note that I failed to do so the first time I dealt with Facebook, but that doesn't make it their fault -- rafer.net/post/168541483/lookeryupdate
Please also note, that I'd be damn excited for app.net's current iteration to take off and will go out of my way to use it if I can. I'd love a dev program that had ongoing stewardship built in, but no for-profit platform provider has ever made such a thing work over time.
I don't think that the key message is that FB's negotiating tactics are surprising. Whilst he was certainly surprised the point is surely that he was shocked because their behavior at the meeting was so at variance with what he had previously been led to believe. You say that FB's tactics are 'ruthlessly consistent' and 'well known' but this is surely a simplification. For example, the FB platform supports games but I am not aware of any instances in which FB has muscled in on a games dev.
I agree that it is helpful to point out that there are major risks when you develop for an alleged platform. But isn't that the point of his post?
I think the point of the app.net initiative is to create a platform that because of its different business model (subscription for infrastructure/service) will not suffer the conflicts that are inevitable when the business model is ads. And whilst this is indeed unusual lately, it is not long ago that such for-profit platforms were the norm. Older examples include, DOS, Windows, UNIX, Linux, X-Windows... More recently there is a profusion of companies providing commercial support for open source software or providing such software as a service.
Facebook has muscled in on literally everything but games, other than their ex poste facto 30% revenue share, and during their earnings report they intimated that they may get into games directly.
And, I'm shocked at your statement about the older platforms. I don't know if your entire background is on your LinkedIn page, but what you say is simply not true of Windows, DOS, the Mac, and is very tough to credit to Sun or SGI in their heydays. Those vendors cherry picked their ISVs all the time and with no more rhetorical consistency, stewardship, or charity than Dalton describes. They did so because they had market share in their segments and could.
That's why I specifically included this in my post: Playing naive to that reality went out the window in the mid-1980s with PC software and has been reproven by the platforms at least every 24 months since.
Everyone from RedHat to BeOS to Sega who behaved (somewhat) better did so because they needed their ecologies to grow. If they'd succeeded in building market share, I'm pretty sure I could predict their changes in policy.
> I am not aware of any instances in which FB has muscled in on a games dev.
I gather Zynga has that covered (and has an interesting relationship with Facebook)