Atari Jaguar, 3DO, Neo-Geo, and WebOS and other assorted platform failures along with the successes of OSX, Android, iOS, Xbox, psx, and nintendo left a strong imprint on why and how I develop software platforms. I learned you can’t just promise radical new opportunities, you have to have them ready and usable on launch day. This allows users to buy in on day one and be generally happy. Then this motivates third party developers which then snowballs into more users and then the platform achieves takeoff velocity.

Ultimately all successful platforms are a collective ecosystem experience, but they start just between the user and the first party developer.

Teams like Occulus are falling down the same trap as 3DO, promising lots of new expertise’s but demonstrating little to no day-one practicality.