The drawbridges come up: the dream of a interconnected context ecosystem is over

Laughs/Cries in SAP

It's inevitable. You can't afford to just provide a platform for free that someone else monetizes. I wonder what API plans are reasonable:

* Just let your users pay for API access at a per-call rate

* Charge app developer per user

The problem is that ultimately the LTV of the average user is high, but this is skewed up by the most valuable users who will switch to a different app that will inevitably attempt to hijack your userbase once they control enough of your users.

A classic example is that imgur became a social network of its own once it had enough Reddit users and only Reddit doing their own image/video hosting stemmed that bleeding.

And then there's the fact that if you choose the payment-based approaches, one app will suction the data out and compete with you for it; inevitably some user will lose his data through some app breach and blame you; and the basic app any newbie developer will build will be "yours but ad-free" which is fine for him because you're paying the development and hosting costs of the entire infra.

It's no surprise everyone converges on preventing API access. Even Metafilter does.

I'm curious if anyone has an idea for API access that can nonetheless be a successful company. Everyone's always got some idea with negative margin and negative feedback loops which they bill as "but that won't make you a billionaire" (that's true, because your company will fail) but I wonder if there is some way that could work without ruining social network network-effects etc.

for me, when both Facebook and Google rejected Jabber/XMPP federation :(

but yeah, in general, what happened to the dream of true Data Portability?

I have made it my mission to conquer SAP and gain control of our own critical financial data.

As a business, they uniquely leverage inefficient and clunky design to drive profit. Simply because they haven’t documented their systems sufficiently, it is “industry standard practice” to go straight to a £100/hr+ consultant to build what should be straightforward integrations and perform basic IT Admin procedures.

Through many painful late nights I have waded through their meticulously constructed labyrinth of undocumented parameters and gotchas built on foot-guns to eventually get to both build and configure an SAP instance from scratch and expose a complete API in Python.

It is for me a David and Goliath moment, carrying more value than the consultancy fees and software licences I've spared my company.

I m optimistic, because LLMs can understand plain language. MCP won't last as the article correctly states, but you will always be able to say to your AI to open your email and search whatever. And companies cannot block you from doing that as long as it is your own PC / Phone.

If we do allow companies to block AI agents from accessing our own computers and data, then the users are to blame for falling again into another BigTech trap.