The Ecosystem Test

Roaming the 3GSM halls and talking to operators and vendors, one thing becomes painfully clear: many players in the mobile space have never experienced an open ecosystem evolved through market forces. This has an effect on how they see the viability of certain approaches in the space.

Let’s look at a specific example of this thinking in the context of phone user experiences. Take any app or phone top design. With a good team and enough money, one can deliver this experience built on everything from plain C to J2ME to S60. By that argument, C, J2ME and Series 60 are viable platforms for phone user experiences. That would be the typical mobile operator perspective.

I disagree because this type of thinking fails what I’ve started calling “the ecosystem test”. The ecosystem test asks whether a platform can enable a large group of average, poorly funded players with little to no domain experience deliver compelling solutions and build real businesses on top of the platform. It’s based on the observation that no platform has become hugely successful without a corresponding ecosystem of vendors building significant businesses on top of the platform. Typically, the combined revenues of the ecosystem are a multiple of the revenues of the platform.

A platform that does not pass the ecosystem test will find it difficult to get significant traction because of the high cost of adoption. Passing the ecosystem test allows a platform to enable a vibrant market with much lower cost experimentation where surprising killer apps or hits can emerge.

There are many successful examples of developer platforms: Visual Basic, PowerBuilder, many of the Web platforms based on HTML (ColdFusion, PHP, ASP, modern “one page” apps with supporting [micro-]services). Microsoft Office and SharePoint create an emerging platform for knowledge worker apps. Great Plains is a great SMB ERP platform.

About Simeon Simeonov

Entrepreneur. Investor. Trusted advisor.
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3 Responses to The Ecosystem Test

  1. Alan Cole says:

    I’m not sure I see how DOS and Windows are exceptions to your “ecosystem test.” The appearance of DOS on the relatively affordable PC in 1981 did allow from day one a huge number of individuals and companies, many “average, poorly funded players,” to open the floodgates to a torrent of applications, including killer apps such as word processing programs and spreadsheets from a variety of companies. The huge army of DOS developers followed right along to Windows, introducing many thousands of applications to what must surely be called “a vibrant market.”

  2. Alan, I guess I’m setting the ease of adoption bar quite high. DOS and Windows actually weren’t that easy to develop for initially. Visual Basic was easy to develop in and is a platform that would pass the ecosystem test. Windows in its native form–an OS with a C-level APIs would fail. Anyone who’s tried to build a Windows app in the early days (pre-MFC) would attest to the pain involved.

  3. Sam S says:

    Hmm … but DOS sure enabled the building of many Clone PC’s.

    I’m not sure if it has to be about Apps alone or just the Empowering smaller innovators

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