My partner Brad wrote a very interesting essay on the USV blog this week that I'm not sure got enough attention. In it he asserts that we should be looking at big tech platforms like Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Craigslist as governments. He says:
A lot of people have begun using the term ecosystem to describe these
big platforms. That captures their decentralized, emergent character,
but ecosystems do not have a central point of control. Apple decided to
eliminate third party analytics between one release and the next. That
doesn't happen in an ecosystem. The right analogy is a government.
And then Brad goes on to describe what kinds of governments he thinks Apple, Facebook, and Twitter are like. He ends with a look at Craigslist and how we can all learn from the approach they have taken.
It's a really interesting post. I'd encourage everyone to go give it a read.
