I don't think we disagree on any of the facts you suggested. Obviously you need to win the platform if you want to be successful. You're interpreting from business point of view and I'm interpreting from macro economical view. And in this view, every human activity revolves around money. If something is not economical, each economic actor will leave, and the technology will lose out. Of course, on a lower level there's user experience, network effects, etc. but on a more fundamental level if you think of the entire world as a network of human value transactions, it does become mostly about money what people spend their time on (with opportunity costs and all)
> FB won because FB was where people posted and read posts. No one even knew that facebook would be such a great ad platform at that point
FB got traction because it was free. If they charged for posting it would have lost to some other service.
And during the early days FB survived because they raised money from VCs, and the VCs thought that there WILL be ways to make money if they got tons of users somehow.
If FB was some drug dealing, child trafficking service, then VCs wouldn't have put money into it. Even if we don't go that far, we can just look at music tech industry to see how this applies. Investors really got burned by Napster and never wanted to invest in a music tech company anymore because they knew it was a difficult industry to make money in.
Imagine how many people will be building web services if it was guaranteed that nobody made any money from it. That's why I keep saying it's all about money.
But I get your point, and I will compromise with you and say it's not "all" about money but "mostly" about money. After all, people build these web services in hopes of making money. That's why they form corporations (corporation's main function is to make money)