Why Building Our Own OS Reduced Platform Risk
I discuss why building our own operating system shifted from seeming unrealistic to becoming a strategic necessity. After a serious outage on a third-party platform, the risks of relying too heavily on someone else’s ecosystem became impossible to ignore.
Key Takeaways
- Relying on existing operating systems can expose organisations to faults and limitations outside their control.
- A major outage highlighted the commercial risk of building critical products on platforms without strong partner leverage.
- At a certain scale, building core technology in-house can become less risky than depending on external platforms.
Topics
- Technology
- Engineering
- Business Strategy
- Platform Risk
Transcript
The reason for building our own operating system, it's just something that at the beginning I would have thought, oh my God, that would be a crazy thing to do. That's way too, too much for us. Like, why don't we just use the existing operating systems? Well, you have to learn by using those existing operating systems and realising their faults and their issues. And the only real way to overcome it is effectively to do it yourself at certain scale. And actually, after a particularly bad outage we experienced on one of the platforms, where we were really on our knees for about five days and we had no way of really getting any leverage with—it was on the Amazon Fire platform. It wasn't Amazon's fault, but it was kind of, we had no relationship, proper relationship going there. We were completely stuck for five days and we thought this could be a real terminal blow. Thankfully, we didn't. But that prompted that exploration of like, this is just too much risk. And if you're building too much on someone else's platform and they're not really engaged on it, then you're really open to so much risk. And actually, the risk of building yourself suddenly looks much, much less. Yes, I totally agree.