Riding the bear
It was just part of, as we used to call it, the time riding the bear. You just had to try to stay on the bear’s back and the bear would twist and turn and try to buck you and throw you, but darn, we were going to ride the bear because the bear was the biggest, the most important you just had to be with the bear, otherwise you would be under the bear in the computer industry, and IBM was the bear, and we were going to ride the back of the bear.
That underdog quote is from Steve Ballmer’s interview in the 1996 documentary Triumph of the Nerds. I was in my early teens at the time Triumph was released and I learned a lot from it since I had no connections in the computer industry. I launched my first Internet (we capitalized internet back in those days) company shortly after. That line from Ballmer always stuck with me.
You can now make a Mad Lib using Ballmer’s quote. Just replace “IBM” with “platform provider”. Maybe you’ll want to fill in Apple, Facebook or Twitter.
In light of Twitter’s and Apple’s moves this week which place the said platform providers in further competition with some of their developers, many pundits are reminding us of how risky it is to start building a company around someone else’s platform.
They’re right — it’s very risky. Just look what happened to Microsoft (MS-DOS relied almost exclusively on IBM in the early days), Paypal (mostly a payment tool for eBay during their entrepreneurial growth phase), Google (most of their traffic came via powering Yahoo’s search for a while), Intuit (mostly reliant on Microsoft Windows while competing with Microsoft Money) and Zanga (reliant on Facebook). They thoughtfully took on tremendous risk and worked hard to mitigate the risk. All fast growing tech startups take on risk, and often a platform risk is a significant part of it.
Building on other people’s platforms is a big risk for a startup. The far more terrifying risk is that no one will use what the startup builds.
