Agreed. "We'd have APIs if y'all didn't use them" is a really bad take.
Part of the reason why API access is desirable is because it forms an effective safeguard against some forms of company abuse. To argue that we can only have API access if nobody uses it for adversarial interoperability or to build 3rd-party clients or to bypass systems -- we might as well argue against API access entirely if that's going to be our position. The point of API access is to be able to use it.
The entire VC model in this area of tech is to be unprofitable to undercut traditional mediums so that other companies can't compete with them, and then to raise prices once better systems have been driven out because with investor funding Spotify can last for a longer time than its competitors within an unprofitable market.
And during that process, Spotify wants to be treated as if they are profitable. They don't want consumers to be looking at them like they're a fly-by-night business whose entire existence depends on raising prices in the future once consumers have no alternatives to switch to. They don't want podcasting partners to be looking at every business deal as a temporary arrangement that will only last until Spotify feels comfortable trying to pull the rug out beneath them. If we're going to start acting like businesses are charity cases when indie developers do anything they dislike, then we should stop acting like these "charities" are sustainable businesses at all.
Spotify doesn't run ads saying, "hey, we can't make money and we're hoping that goodwill and investor greed is enough to keep this engine running for one more year until its safe to start charging you what we actually need to survive."
It's reasonable for developers and consumers to treat businesses with substantial market control as if they are businesses and not charities. That treatment is consistent with how Spotify advertises and portrays itself and with the decisions that the company makes about the market. It's not an accident that Spotify is in this position, it's a conscious choice in service of pursuing a long-term strategy of market domination. It's also not a healthy choice for the market overall, so Spotify choosing to put itself into this position is not a moral obligation for consumers or developers to treat them with some kind of special consideration. If anything, we should be more harsh to companies who try to decrease competition by creating an artificially unstainable market and starving out sustainable businesses and funding models.
For all intents and purposes Spotify is a billion dollar company making moves to lock down open ecosystems like podcasting that are consistent with a billion dollar company. If it's also a poorly managed billion dollar company that's lying to consumers about the actual cost of delivering music, then that's their problem -- it's not something we need to feel guilty about.
> The entire VC model in this area of tech is to be unprofitable to undercut traditional mediums so that other companies can't compete with them, and then to raise prices once better systems have been driven out
Sometimes but not always. The best example is Uber/Lyft: taxis sucked before ride shares, they continued to suck after being "disrupted" by ride shares. Both in terms of price and quality of the service.
Briefly, Uber and Lyft were less expensive than traditional cabs, but now I'm back to spending the same $40 to go to the airport that I did a decade ago. The difference being that the cabbie can't have their machine magically "stop accepting cards" once you arrive.
Though to be fair, the taxi industry had been terrible for decades, and are the exception
Uber is an interesting example. I think there are genuine improvements that came out of what they did, most notably the idea of having a unified app that you could go to just to request rides that felt usable and that could do things like tell you how close your driver was and that would allow you to pay online.
On the other hand, I think it's become clear that Uber's pricing wasn't sustainable, and part of the reason why Uber was less expensive was because it wasn't sustainable and rides-on-demand might just be something that is naturally expensive because it's expensive, not because taxis were all exploiting the market.
I don't want to say that the taxi industry shouldn't have been "disrupted", everything I've heard about how taxis operated makes it feel like that industry was a poorly run cartel. But I sort of feel like there must have been a better way to disrupt it than what Uber did, and the winner-takes-all approach that Uber took probably introduced some harms as well. Having a decent app that allows you to know in advance what you'll pay, to be able to pay online -- those are value propositions that in theory should have been enough to make Uber competitive even without shoveling VC money into a furnace and saying, "we'll figure out the profit part once we own the market."
But I can't know for sure what would have happened.
It feels like when the VC model does yield improvements we end up getting those improvements in a batch lump during the "nice" phase of the company. And then we end up back at square one where there are a few taxi services that increasingly care less and less about doing a good job. I'd prefer a system where businesses compete on quality as much as they can without ignoring pricing realities, because who knows -- maybe there were other taxi services that might have done an even better job than Uber or who might have had improvements that Uber might have been forced to copy, but they couldn't operate or compete because unlike Uber they didn't have a bunch of rich investors throwing money at them covering for all of their losses.
The honeymoon period with VC companies is nice and sometimes occasionally we get permanent improvements out of it, but overall it's necessarily temporary, and it masks the fact that Uber probably would have needed to compete a lot harder and would have needed to make their experience even better if they weren't able to charge so little for rides for so long.
That's not the fault, nor responsibility, of developers and API access.
API access (interop) is a digital human right. If companies can't be profitable without restricting that then that's a deficiency upon them and their gormless VCs
I'm with it on this idea, but comparing it to a "human right" will not lead to the desired response in non-tech people, who will write off the idea as taking the Internet too seriously if phrased that way. A human right carries a much heavier, more fundamental connotation than just a right on its own
Even if you consider it a human right, might be better to brand it differently to get wider traction
Respectfully, I'm not trying to win people over or proselytize. This is what I believe strongly and I'm not trying to make it digestible. It is what it is.
