Comments on: Do VCs Help in Building a Technology Platform; Part 2 http://abovethecrowd.com/2008/12/05/do-vcs-help-in-building-a-technology-platform-part-2/ ...focusing on the evolution and economics of high technology business and strategy. By day, I am a venture capitalist at Benchmark Capital. Fri, 03 Feb 2012 05:25:49 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Robert Hoffer http://abovethecrowd.com/2008/12/05/do-vcs-help-in-building-a-technology-platform-part-2/#comment-159 Mon, 15 Dec 2008 07:46:15 +0000 http://abovethecrowd.com/?p=66#comment-159 Yah. This is spot on. But they’ve known about the notion of platform building straight along at MSFT and have lost their mojo – the vast bulk of apps written in C use MSVC compiler; but where does this matter if the platform is an iPhone? VCs don’t really set the trend they follow the trend of the talented entrepreneurs who are making their early decisions based on fiscal responsibility. Why pay Microsoft? Or Oracle for that matter – for all that extra cost overhead? The argument used to be that everyone ‘knew’ those platforms and therefore building and maintaining was cheaper; that hasn’t been the case for a long time. You can scale either MSFT or Oracle based apps, technically, but not cost efficiently. And I think this is the key driver. So if VCs see that the good tech entrepreneurs all show up and don’t bother to use third party “platform” products then they naturally just gravitate away. This is particularly true in any hardware environment – why deploy a new type of compute device that is dependent on an OS in which you can’t control the source code for developing embedded systems and ASICs? While the VC decision in this case may appear to be self-referential logic in this case that logic that just happens to be correct.

]]> By: niles Fauvel http://abovethecrowd.com/2008/12/05/do-vcs-help-in-building-a-technology-platform-part-2/#comment-152 Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:56:57 +0000 http://abovethecrowd.com/?p=66#comment-152 sure it’s got nothing to do with the fact that if you want uptime in a web service you don’t use microsoft.

Microsoft has never had a good version release of their webserver, it’s a forced trend. People build on microsoft then realize it doesn’t scale and convert. Got nothing to do with anything else but that.

]]> By: Chris Treadaway http://abovethecrowd.com/2008/12/05/do-vcs-help-in-building-a-technology-platform-part-2/#comment-147 Fri, 05 Dec 2008 23:05:19 +0000 http://abovethecrowd.com/?p=66#comment-147 Economy notwithstanding, it’s a great time to be a tech entrepreneur. We are indeed in the age of dev platform proliferation. All the major players need examples/case studies of hot, thriving startups using their technologies and *not* their competitors. I look for the trend to continue as dev platform providers fight it out for entrepreneurs.

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