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Comment by chasil

8 months ago

As I hear stories of Apple, Google, and Microsoft revoking valuable access, I remember this article...

"Don’t build your castle in other people’s kingdoms."

https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-cast...

22 comments

chasil

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israrkhan  8 months ago

In this day and age, it is almost impossible for certain businesses not to build on someone's else kingdom.

Facebook, instagram, uber, lyft, doordash, instacart, and hundreds of unicorn businesses are literally built on top of ecosystems that are controlled by 2 or 3 companies.

  • worik  8 months ago

    > In this day and age, it is almost impossible for certain businesses not to build on someone's else kingdom.

    No it is not

    It is often difficult and expensive, relative to letting Facebook (or the like) do the hosting.

    But VPSs are a thing, you can run almost any software on them.

    Stretching the analogy: Build your castle on your own bedrock, and build "forts", or "outposts", on the enemy territory

    Ignoring Facebook et. el. is stupid, but depending on them is fool hardy

    • dgrin91  8 months ago

      Thats not what other people's kingdoms means. Basically all non-trivial apps are already built on VPSs. The other people's kingdoms refers to how people interact with your app. Take Zynga - they were not literally running on FB servers, I'm sure they had their own VPS, but their games just had 0 reach outside of FB. When FB decided to change things Zynga just got fucked, VPS or not.

  • graemep  8 months ago

    If you have a possible very high return for taking that risk (as the unicorn businesses do) then do it in full knowledge of the risk.

    I am not convinced those businesses are good examples. Could they have redeployed elsewhere if they had to? Where they tied to one supplier? Did they have backups else where?

    Most businesses and individuals do not have to take that risk and can avoid it.

    • SpicyLemonZest  8 months ago

      The key insight is that mitigating risk isn’t a free action. No business has the bandwidth to avoid even most of the risks they could in principle avoid; you allocate some effort towards the ones that make sense to mitigate, and hope the others don’t come to pass.

      4 replies →

  • pphysch  8 months ago

    There was a fleeting moment where the Internet was the "Wild West" but we are long past that. The GP's idiom is about as practical as "don't be a citizen of any state".

    • metalliqaz  8 months ago

      That is a really great analogy and it's so true.

      The only counter point I can think of is that you can always choose to build upon multiple tech platforms simultaneously, and depending on the technology you need, it might not even add all that much additional cost to do so.

  • hulitu  8 months ago

    > In this day and age, it is almost impossible for certain businesses not to build on someone's else kingdom.

    No it is not. It is only the greed for bigger profits. If a company can work with Microsoft, it can also work with LibreOffice. But LibreOffice doesn't promise them the moon, while sucking every cent out of them.

  • thewebguyd  8 months ago

    I mean, technically you don't have to use those ecosystems and could roll your own stuff, including infrastructure instead of AWS but it's definitely going to be expensive.

    Which is why we need regulation for those big players (gatekeepers as the EU has taken to calling them). If you're going to be so huge that you essentially operate your own market and economy, then you need to be regulated like one, and forced to play nice, interoperate, and not favor your own services.

    • unyttigfjelltol  8 months ago

      Not so technically, your business needs customers and efficiencies. Big tech strategically positions themselves at those choke points.

      But realistically , if Google and Apple both for whatever reason banned you from all their services, idk why, then you would not have access to a phone. So then you say, well, it was just one person in ten million, and they probably did something wrong-- and now you share the same perspective as Big Tech on this specific issue.

  • msgodel  8 months ago

    There's a good reason they're called unicorns. That's not a strategy you should adopt for any business that's actually important to you.

  • ajb  8 months ago

    If you have billions of dollars of revenue, you can make the law of tort work the way it is supposed to.

throwaway290  8 months ago

When did it happen in Apple land?