For Platforms, The Problem is Trust

First published April 23, 2010 

Over the past couple weeks, the consumer technology community has gotten all riled up over actions taken by Twitter and Apple. Basically, both companies placed greater restrictions on what third party developers can do on their platform. Third party developers are the folks who build things like Twitpic for Twitter or any of the apps in the iPhone app store.  
 
Is it cool for Twitter and Apple to place these types of restrictions? 
 
1. It's their platform, so they can set the rules they want.  
2. If they set rules no one likes, they run the risk of losing the development community. If they lose the development community, they run the risk of losing the end user who wants all the competing apps and moves to a platform that will allow them to have all the apps they want.  
 
Twitter and Apple say these rules help make a better platform that can create the experience the end user wants. While I agree this argument has many merits, I'm skeptical of its overusage; at the end of the day, consumers will want more apps, and thus a big part of why Windows beat out Macintosh for the desktop computer market (because you can get more software apps to run on Windows). Apple is the worst here, no one believes them when they say their policies are for the good of the children and all that crap.  
 
The real problem is one of trust. Twitter, Apple and all the other platforms can do whatever they want, but if the development community doesn't know what they are going to do, the development community will get frustrated and not feel comfortable building on top of the platform.  
 
There needs to be rules. There needs to be processes on how these rules can be changed.  
 
Also, the ultimate situation is that the developers and the platform are a part of the same economy. They are fighting with each other for the attention and revenue of the end user. As such, the only real way to squash the beef between platforms and developers will be to work out revenue sharing arrangements, so that qualified developers have the incentive to expand the economy.  
 
And this is where technology businesses are headed. Note this has very little to do with technology. That is of course important, but the best apps are simple, and the best ecosystems can solve the biggest engineering problems. The real basis of competition is platform governance: who can create the best government for their ecosystem of developers.  
 
Ultimately, I expect the winning formula to be something akin to a union, in which the developers collectively own the platform. There will be lots of rules, but the communities will ultimately be a bit small. The best government is local.  
 
These tightly integrated, exclusive platforms will need to work with each other to ensure customers can easily import/export their data. This is where we need to think beyond profit, because everyone is going to have the incentive to try to lock users in to their platform. Facebook is trying to do this. Not going to work. Online or offline, imperial strategies always collapse under their own hubris.