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Shutting down services sucks
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Services are not products. Consumers can switch between products in a snap: you’ll just eat a different bread today, or try another graphics card this time.
With services you can’t do that. Sometimes I’m using exactly this definition to decide whether something I’m using or someone I’m working with is of a product-type or a service-type.
Websites nowadays are basing part of their strategy (and success) on the fact that they’re not a product but centralized services. Open APIs foster the development of tools using the service, if not being based on top of it. Once adopted, services are not easily switched — hence the success of Twitter in the presence of more powerful tools like Pownce and others.
Shutting down services sucks. And when this happens, giving access to users to the service’s data is not enough. There’s so much more than the users’ data, there are the tools and services that were built around the API, and more importantly, there are the people who invested in it, one way or another, and integrated it in their workflow and every-day lives.
To entrepreneurs: Think twice (or thrice) before you build and offer a service, before you ask people to adopt it, put their trust in it, invest in it. Think before you ask developers to build on top of your service; whether we realize it or not, the opening up of the API more or less constitutes as a promise for its long-term viability.
Do think before you accept an acquisition which shuts your service down and leaves hundreds of thousands of people cold-feet (non-business folks read: “moral obligation”). If you’re considering this from the start as “collateral damage” to the goal of getting acquired, be honest with your users upfront. And if you do have to shut it down, think well how much warning time you’ll give your users in advance, how much respectful you’d like to be towards those who put their trust in you.
And since this is just a hope (maybe even a rant), I’ll just encourage readers and friends to think about the above before suggesting such a service to me, before suggesting it to friends, and before vigorously blogging about yet another child of the New Web.
Experimenting is a good thing. Also, a good thing is being considerate about the promises you make and the trust people put in your team.
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noon, Τρίτη 2 Δεκεμβερίου 2008
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