If a component from one manufacturer becomes unavailable (or that manuf. isn't playing "fair"), another one can usually be sourced.
That said, I think that: "don't make your service depend on other services without some sort of contract or agreement to provide" is a better rule of thumb than the one above.
Building your company around the core business of LinkedIn/Facebook/etc is dumb, because you are nothing more than a complement to their core mission. Best case, you become a commodity and achieve modest success, but the oxygen gets cut off at any time.. If you're very successful, you become a feature of the mother product.
When you're Apple buying memory from Samsung, that's different. Samsung's output is memory chips... that's the business. If nobody buys memory chips, they lose money.
On the other hand Apple, Google, Faceobook, Twitter, Amazon and LinkedIn are increasingly sucking all of the oxygen out of the rest of the software ecosytem. Software developers are increasingly being painted in to a corner where all the users are sitting on those platforms all the time and unless you are there too its really hard to get eyeballs to look at your software.
Developing for the open web and trying to get people to websites in the current mobile/social era is increasingly brutal unless you are willing to be completely dependent on a handful of big companies.
The difference is that the core competence of Intel is providing chips to other businesses. It's not a stretch to say everything that goes into an Apple product is made by companies that specialize in selling components to other companies. If some supplier doesn't work out, there are a dozen others to pick up the slack.
Basing your product on top of LinkedIn? The core of their business isn't anywhere near providing that API.
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Most products depend on other products. e.g. Apple computers use components from other manufacturers.
Name one product that doesn't rely on another product.
If a component from one manufacturer becomes unavailable (or that manuf. isn't playing "fair"), another one can usually be sourced.
That said, I think that: "don't make your service depend on other services without some sort of contract or agreement to provide" is a better rule of thumb than the one above.
Additionally, the same model may be sourcing parts from multiple vendors (for instance, laptop displays)
Don't rely on free APIs to stay free. : P
It's not the same concept, at all.
Building your company around the core business of LinkedIn/Facebook/etc is dumb, because you are nothing more than a complement to their core mission. Best case, you become a commodity and achieve modest success, but the oxygen gets cut off at any time.. If you're very successful, you become a feature of the mother product.
When you're Apple buying memory from Samsung, that's different. Samsung's output is memory chips... that's the business. If nobody buys memory chips, they lose money.
On the other hand Apple, Google, Faceobook, Twitter, Amazon and LinkedIn are increasingly sucking all of the oxygen out of the rest of the software ecosytem. Software developers are increasingly being painted in to a corner where all the users are sitting on those platforms all the time and unless you are there too its really hard to get eyeballs to look at your software.
Developing for the open web and trying to get people to websites in the current mobile/social era is increasingly brutal unless you are willing to be completely dependent on a handful of big companies.
The difference is that the core competence of Intel is providing chips to other businesses. It's not a stretch to say everything that goes into an Apple product is made by companies that specialize in selling components to other companies. If some supplier doesn't work out, there are a dozen others to pick up the slack.
Basing your product on top of LinkedIn? The core of their business isn't anywhere near providing that API.