Investor Dave McClure: ‘Open is for losers’ | Hacker News Reader

Investor Dave McClure: ‘Open is for losers’

mobile.venturebeat.com

6 pointsderekc6 comments

"I'm very afraid of a world in which we are all Steve Jobs' slaves, Graham said. If anything can save us, it might be Chrome. When Costolo asked whether he would invest in a company building for the iPhone versus Google's Android platform, Graham answered, Of course iPhone. I’m talking about what I hope will set us free, not what will generate opportunities.

I would see setting us free as the opportunity.

Okay I don't get it. If Graham is afraid of a Steve Jobs world, why did he answer iPhone to that question?

Because PG's realistic. Not a whole lot of non-iPhone mobile apps making money (or even gaining much traction) these days.

I don't get what it is that you don't get.

The fear he has is that a Steve Jobs world is one in which the overall ecosystem for startups is significantly weaker than it would otherwise be. And the reason for that is that Apple will be a gate-keeper, and will be in a position to just take all of the most profitable ideas. It would be like how Microsoft dominated the world of desktop applications in the 1990s - not fun.

The question he was answering iPhone to was whether there exist, today, better business opportunities in the iPhone space or Android space. If you're going to target one, absolutely there are better profit opportunities in the iPhone space. It is kind of like how in the 1990s, despite Microsoft being a major bully in the Windows ecosystem, marketshare meant that there were still better business opportunities doing desktop applications for Windows than for Linux or Mac.

The two questions have little to do with each other.

Because he wants business models for his startups which don't require (too much) miracles?

I don't understand why we have to make this a binary, zero-sum game. There is a continuum from completely open to completely closed and most companies operate somewhere in the middle. Open software simply allows us to spend less time reinventing everything from the ground up and more time building something new. Where would Apple be now without the BSD userland, GCC, KHTML etc?

The question a smart founder or investor should be asking isn't "Should I build an open or closed system?". It's "What can I build that has the most value?". You'd be crazy not to use as much open software as a foundation as possible and it's good for the health of your business and the industry as a whole to give something back in return.

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