In grade school, one of the key determinants of popularity on the playground was how quickly you were selected when the time came to choose up sides for basketball, baseball, or soccer. In the same way, the developing business model for the next 10 years depends hugely on which set of developer and ecosystem partners pick you.

However, unlike grade school, you might have more ability to influence this selection.

Do developers really matter?

Major companies like eBay, Microsoft, Adobe, Nokia, Motorola, Intuit and others have focused on the developer community. Within Web 2.0, the developer world is a critical consideration for technology companies. This applies even if your company isn't doing software or delivery on the Web. Developers have become what the channel was in the 80s: a necessary part of the chain that extends your reach.

Developing technology software and hardware has grown far beyond just coming up with a "widget." When vendors meet customers' needs, it's not a "design it, build it, sell it" loner activity. Today, technology is much more about connecting lots of different technologies and solutions. For example, Zillow is built using Google Maps and a housing database. Yet, Google Maps is built using Telcontar technology and Navteq. None of these individual companies is the entire solution. But the combination of different technologies allows a customer solution (or, in this case, many) to be created.

Thus, no one vendor creates winning solutions alone.

Only a few industry insiders know that Telcontar is the primary technology behind Google Maps. What the broader public is familiar with is Google, because it's Google that formed the developer community to enable a high number of applications to be built on the platform. This case illustrates that success occurs as more value is added to a platform, because the platform then attracts developers, businesses, and consumers eager to develop on it, use it, and transact business with it.

The multiplier effect

Developers are the most amazing creatures on earth. It's through them and with them that any platform becomes interesting. Back when I worked at Apple, I fell in love with a simple screen saver. It was the first of its kind and it made my screen look like a fish tank. Way cool. Besides that coolness effect, developers add to the foundation that a vendor creates, then they multiply it. Developers design new applications that will change users' lives. And from a vendors' perspective, it's like going from 2000 software engineers to 20,000. It's a multiplier, a relatively inexpensive multiplier.

Through this multiplier, a vendor wins. When eBay creates a developer community, it no longer provides a service for ecommerce. Instead, it provides a proven global platform for ecommerce. By releasing the APIs, and leveraging their user interface, developers enable full integration into many models. When that happens, their company achieves critical mass and the competition must use much more energy to displace it. Sometimes the competition decides the market is too difficult to enter. The company gains strength geometrically as it becomes a platform that 1,000 (or better yet, 100,000) companies support.

Developer strategy must be considered a fundamental company vision. For example, the mobile market has been getting a lot of attention about their developer strategy. Nokia, the predominant leader of mobile phones in Europe, and Motorola, the leader in the U.S., have been investing in new talents and developer programs lately. Why? If Nokia gets more developers on its platform vs. Motorola, then it gets a stronger set of applications that users want, thus creating real market differentiation.

The resulting cascade of better developers à better solutions à better value à more customers means a better value proposition to your developers. An upward cycle is built that will cause some form of category domination. Only when a developer-centric model is built into a business model does that company fundamentally add more value, faster results, and more benefits for the customer. This is no minor issue and it's one that has been put on the back-burner and ignored in this industry.

What does it take to build a developer community?

At Apple, I created a developer program for server products. The task at hand was to figure out a differentiation strategy by adding a specific application along with the high-profit servers, find a route to market, and create more value for the customer. What I learned during that project was this: Developers as a whole are some of the most intelligent, creative, and curious folks that exist. And getting them committed is both easy and hard.