If a company wants to make a platform that startups will build on, they have to make it something that hackers themselves will want to use. That means it has to be inexpensive and well-designed. The Mac was popular with hackers when it first came out, and a lot of them wrote software for it.14 You see this less with Windows, because hackers don’t use it. The kind of people who are good at writing software tend to be running Linux or FreeBSD now.
