![]() ![]() Greedy platform companies can’t stand the idea of all kinds of unwashed riffraff making money off of their platform, so they make it darn near impossible for anyone to develop for it. Most of the time, this happens because platform companies either don’t know that they have a platform (they think it’s an application) or they get greedy (they want all the revenue for themselves.) The best way to kill a platform is to make it hard for developers to build on it. If you want a platform to be successful, you need massive adoption, and that means you need developers to develop for it. ![]() No other development platform became so predominant so quickly (even Visual Basic, the top selling computer language of all time, took years to ramp up.) Printing was important, so OS/2 had no applications.īut the counter-examples are just as interesting:Įxample: The first versions of Windows included a freely redistributable runtime so that if you wrote a Windows application, you could sell it to anyone with DOS, you weren’t limited to the few weirdo dorks (me!) who bought Windows 1.0.Įxample: Despite the mistakes that Sun made with Java, the runtime was always free and good Java tools were cheap or free, too. If you got too successful, Apple competed against you (although sometimes they had a hand puppet called Claris compete against you so they could pretend it wasn’t them.)Įxample: Developing software for OS/2 1.0 required an investment of $3000 for the SDK, and you had to write all your own printer drivers if printing was important for you. ![]() Every new OS for almost 20 years required tweaks and changes to application code. One of the biggest themes in software industry failures is a platform vendor that didn’t understand that they were a platform vendor, so they alienated their key constituency: the developers.Įxample: NetWare took so long to release reasonable tools for creating NLMs that when Unix and Windows NT came along with superior and cheaper development tools, they swept away the mindshare of server software developers.Įxample: Apple has spent decades making life miserable for their developers. Being an analytical kind of guy, I look for common themes. I just had the good fortune to read an advance copy of Rick Chapman’s excellent new book on stupidity in the software industry. That’s because a platform needs to appeal to developers first and foremost, not end users. It’s really, really important to figure out if your product is a platform or not, because platforms need to be marketed in a very different way to be successful. And don’t forget that Windows didn’t start out as an OS, it started out as a program you ran on DOS which (out of the box) didn’t do much of anything, but enabled software developers to create GUI applications for inexpensive Intel boxes. Many platforms live on top of operating systems, such as the Java Runtime. So they write operating systems, or DBMSs, or language runtimes like Java, and they hope to attract independent software developers to create the great new applications that their platforms enable.Īlmost by definition, an operating system is a platform. But the brave among us want to change the world more significantly, and they choose to work on platforms: big giant slabs of software that don’t quite do anything out of the box, but which enable a whole world of new and interesting applications. You know, programs that do something or solve some particular problem. Most software developers, including Fog Creek Software, are perfectly happy just to write software applications. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |