Over the last several years, what we're seeing is all the big companies doing their damnedest to prevent any new company from coming along and taking over eyeba

Over the last several years, what we're seeing is all the big companies doing their damnedest to prevent any new company from coming along and taking over eyeballs. Don't be fooled: there is a vicious commercial war afoot. Facebook wants you to build apps in their walled garden -- which they own and will change the rules as they please. Google would love to buy your startup that looks like it might be huge -- so they can make you an employee and let your product either live or die in the Google ecosystem, not the market. Yahoo is willing to absorb that great business you're running -- so they can own your work and relationships and keep the eyeballs. Comcast wants to provide internet service to your house -- as long as it can create some byzantine tiered billing system to obfuscate what you're getting and charge providers for getting it to you. All of the tech industry is now getting very politically savvy. Who is one of the top visitors to the White House? The Google guys. Political campaigns on the left -- but I suspect the right won't be far behind -- are more and more powered by tech money and tech volunteers. No matter how much "Don't be evil" you're able to swallow, people tend to see things from inside their own tiny worldview. Just so I don't sound completely paranoid, note that platform risk is an issue even for purely technology platforms built on FOSS. Any time one set of folks build something and another set of folks use it, the two interests do not always align. Systems tend to become more and more complex and unwieldy. Users of the platform spend more time appeasing the platform architecture than they do providing value. It just gets worse when you add money to the mix.