News.com has a nice story on how several companies have used the approach of satrting with an application and when it becomes popular to convert it to a platform to really make it popular.
“The Internet is the new operating system. The killer apps of the Internet are becoming platforms that are creating communities of innovation,” said Marc Benioff, chief executive of customer-relationship management specialist Salesforce.com. “This is a whole new chapter in our industry.”
Interestingly, if you have solid and well technology and well designed architecture, then this is narural.
Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google, said she agreed with Zuckerberg that platforms often happen naturally in technology companies.
Here is a good lesson for budding entrepreneurs.
Yes, it is common in this ultra modern hi tech world that companies make applications for human benefit and when these applications are famous enough, then the companies don’t really hesitate to sell it and if the applications doesn’t attract that much crowd then the project is regarded as ‘fail’. I am afraid that the community sites like Orkut will also come under this type of situation one day.