I don't buy this at all. In fact, I don't buy the conventional wisdom that developers are what makes and breaks a platform. Developers do what Deep Thr

I don't buy this at all. In fact, I don't buy the conventional wisdom that developers are what makes and breaks a platform. Developers do what Deep Throat suggests: they follow the money. Sure a large body of developers follow the money, but a fantastic minority go and develop compensation-less bits of software such as Linux, Apache, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rails, Django, MySQL, Postgresql, Redis, NodeJS, etc. (Of course, as the projects mature and get noticed, money will appear and developers will flock to these platforms, too; and, of course, public recognition is a currency, too) Devs are not a homogeneous bunch and, unlike other groups, they can significantly affect the trajectory of a platform. See: Lego Mindstorms. This is not to say that developers are magical and that users, marketers, etc are not needed. It was naive to go into building on someone else's platform any other way (yet many did seem to believe that Twitter was somehow "different"). Also apparently naive: Zynga, FriendFeed, TweetDeck, PopCap, etc.