[dotBen]

Yup, they just did a Twitter.

I lived through the Twitter ecosystem collapse and now I'm a VC I worry about investing in startups that are built on any large ecosystem where there isn't an alignment of clear economic interest.

Google of all people doing this just made it tougher for everyone else to maintain confidence in large vendor platforms.

[TeMPOraL]

Here's a note, straight from quotes file, I took around the original Twitter fiasco, and have since reposted or mentioned on HN a few times on occasions similar to this:

* Sovereign from Mass Effect on using someone else's technology:

"Your civilization is based on the technology of the mass relays, our technology. By using it, your society develops along the paths we desire. We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution. You exist because we allow it, and you will end because we demand it." Strangely, it seems to describe recent (2012/2013) situation with API of Twitter perfectly.

--

Twitter did that twice[0] already, but it's a lesson people have to learn and relearn repeatedly: this is what happens when you build a business entirely around someone else's platform.

--

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10427530

[ajlburke]

Between this and the infamous hacker group called "The Shadow Brokers" I think it's time someone did a study on the influence of Mass Effect on tech culture.

Not me, though - I'm in the middle of some calibrations right now.

[Teledhil]

Damn you, EA, I liked Mass Effect 1 so much.

[gambiting]

Yeah it's a shame they never made any more after the third one.

[zimablue]

[Spoiler alert, Hyperion series] That sounds totally lifted from the Hyperion series, but maybe the idea is earlier than that, does anyone have a proposed source for that idea that's earlier than 1989?

[wombatpm]

Dune (which was based on the concept of a hydraulic empire)

"The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it." - Frank Herbert, Dune

[djsumdog]

The writers were big Sci-Fi fans. The Asari were heavily influenced by the Minbari of Babylon 5. There are lots of other callouts to classic Sci-Fi in the series.

[asark]

The bones of the setting and plot, the tone, plus lots of details, are so heavily borrowed from B5 that it's practically a kind of remix.

Not complaining, though, since [heresy incoming] they seem to have said "what if we took B5's setting but tweaked it to make it better" and then did it.

[j03m1]

That ending tho. Unforgivable.

[XaoDaoCaoCao]

I will always be mad about the ME3 ending. If reincarnation is something that happens, my reincarnated self will be mad about the ME3 ending from birth.

What a godamn waste.

[CaptainMarvel]

As someone who never played the games but has a rough idea of story and characters, what was wrong with the ending(s)?

[shrimp_emoji]

The Reapers definitely fill a similar role as the Hegemony's TechnoCore, but the idea is so general: bigger, smarter entities leverage their natural advantage over smoller, dumber ones (who are sympathetic and protagonistic and somehow win love powers the universe shh it's ok).

[ZeikJT]

Slightly different if you play renegade :)

[cpeterso]

[light spoilers]

In Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey", the alient Monoliths influenced human evolution and later decided to terminate the human race instead.

In Fredrick Pohl's Heechee series, humans stumble upon abandoned alien technology and use it without understanding how it works.

[afterburner]

> but it's a lesson people have to learn and relearn repeatedly

Money now (gambling investors?), worry later.

[_jal]

If you build on someone else's platform, the best case is you get to be a sharecropper and can make money as long as you don't make so much that your platform-betters get jealous.

The more typical case is this, where you get to spend your time and money doing real-world R&D and discovery of what works for them, for free.

If you're going to dance with a vampire, don't be surprised when it bites you.

[krisgenre]

One way or the other aren't most of us building for someone else's platform anyway?. Mobile, desktop, browser...

[sokoloff]

You can build alongside someone else's long-term demonstrated strategy (developing Microsoft desktop software) much more securely than developing a feature in someone else's closed garden.

You can also spread your footprint. As just an easy-to-discuss example, Facebook and Twitter develop for many different someone else's platforms, by supporting multiple browsers [who in turn support multiple OSs], multiple mobile platforms, etc.

[loudmax]

Developing Microsoft desktop software you're still building on someone else's platform and hoping they don't decide to alter the terms of the deal. Microsoft may be more forward thinking than Google, but companies change.

[sokoloff]

Absolutely. That risk is much lower than developing for the Alexa, Nest, Twitter, etc platforms. At some point, you’re forced to build on someone else’s platform(s), even if that platform is “Intel” or “AWS” as no one is doing the entire end-to-end value chain.

[loudmax]

Or build on an open an open source stack. Don't like Intel? Switch to AMD. Don't like AWS? Switch to another cloud.

Proprietary platforms lure developers to their stack by making development easy. Learning an open source is typically more difficult, but the reward is greater freedom. Believing you're forced to build on proprietary technology is a fallacy.

[lbatx]

Agreed. What's funny is that people now think Microsoft is this warm and fuzzy thing. They used to be far worse than they are today. For example, Microsoft Excel is nothing less than Microsoft's successful attempt to destroy Lotus 1-2-3. If the owner of the platform thinks you're getting too big for your britches, you can bet they'll try to take your revenue.

[johannes1234321]

A difference is that Microsoft (currently) can't render your install base useless. If Microsoft drops Windows (or core Windows APIs) your existing users can stil use your software. With Google or Twitter shutting down "cloud"/web APIs all is gone.

[mcguire]

People seem to have forgotten that Microsoft's unofficial motto is "Where do we want you to go today?" They've made an empire out of cutting off competition by changing their ecosystem.

[GoblinSlayer]

Microsoft is all about cloud and web now. Clients are supposed to be web browser (asp.net) or mobile (xamarin), and they plan to add java, objc and swift interop to better target android and ios.

[Retric]

Websites should not be tied to a specific browser. But, if you mean plugins’s then sure that’s a huge risk.

Mobile and desktop both have more risks than the web, but they also have vastly more dependency on their ecosystems.

[ElFitz]

One could say that while some have a platform strategy, others merely have an aggregator strategy

https://stratechery.com/2018/techs-two-philosophies/

[mbesto]

Which is why we have organizations that fight hard to try to keep those as open as possible.

[pm90]

> If you build on someone else's platform,

But isn't that the height of specialization? What does a platform mean anyways if its only used for one thing and not by others?

It it somewhat unfortunate that things like this make it abundantly clear that such a reality is not possible.

[TeMPOraL]

Platform is nothing but a sales&marketing word. It means whatever the owner wants it to.

[mcny]

Google positions angular as a platform.

[feanaro]

It is possible. We just have to prioritize open standards much more than we have been doing in the last decade.

History really repeats itself in this regard. First we get ourselves in a tight situation with lots of closed platforms, which is bad for everyone. Then someone comes along, spouting a new philosophy of openness (Stallman comes to mind). The philosophy takes hold and open technology flourishes for a while.

But then a huge corporation appears, offering to contribute to this new abundant ecosystem with great new things. By now, people are too relaxed and optimistic, so they readily accept this. Yet, little by little, the corporation exploits this, seizing more and more control, until we get right back where we started.

[jfoster]

It's worse than Twitter. Twitter made a strategic decision (correct or not) that applied across their entire business. Google are making this decision and calculating or hoping that it's in isolation from the rest of their business. That really doesn't seem to be the case.

For the rest of their business' life, Google APIs will be met with skepticism about their long-term prospects. That sucks, because it doesn't seem good for anyone. Not good for Google. Not good for their customers. Not good for 3rd party developers.

[Balgair]

Per many comments left on HN, the people that this does benefit are the PMs. It seems that a well-worn path to promotion at google is to launch products. Hence, the reason we have umpteen chat apps. Once the promotion occurs, it seems, the product is all but forgotten, having served it's purpose: a raise.

The divocring of incentives at google are at fault. The PMs aren't incentivied to do what is best for google, as it conflict with what is best for the PMs' families, college funds, mortgages, and health care. Hence, they do what is best for them at the expense of google.

[telchar]

I've already held that opinion of Google products for some time after seeing what a ghost town Sites and Docs are, and the shutdowns of Reader, G+, Wave, etc. At best it seems that you can count on a product silently losing support for years as a hint that you should migrate.

[zmmmmm]

Well, the good news is that Google is kind of outing itself as a true outlier in that space. They clearly do not care at all about hurting developers that build on their platforms and there is enough daylight between them and other large tech companies on this that you probably don't need to extrapolate from Google to the entire tech world.

Makes me sad to say it as someone who has often defended Google in the past, but I can't on this.

[oldjokes]

Google and Amazon are ruthlessly strangling tech startups and smaller mom & pop shops that latch on to something and see a big spike in sales. They have all the data on these companies already, and people are just waiting to jump in and takeover or destroy a company completely regardless of industry or location. They just borg cube consume any success and very few people make any money in this process. This is happening every day, multiple times per day.

That's a way bigger problem than relying on an API or building some app in garden.

[shostack]

Do you have sources to cite on this?

[busymom0]

Reminds me of this:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/19/18140799/amazon-marketpl...

[itsaidpens]

No one should have expected Google to maintain focus on anything.

[Gibbon1]

Microsoft: embrace extend extinguish

Google: Hold my Kombucha!

[Gibbon1]

> Yup, they just did a Twitter.

You misspelled Sauron.

One app to rule them all, One app to find them, One app to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.

[cortesoft]

I would worry about ANY company that is completely reliant on any other one company. You should never get in that situation.