Are software ecosystems a good thing?

 One way to judge the health or strength of a product might be to look at the ecosystem surrounding that product. But is this diagnostic?

 Note that there are several concepts here that are similar to the ecosystem. I'm not referring to the community, those people who might use or support the product. Nor am I talking about a marketplace, which is a source of artefacts that might be consumed by the product. Those are important in their own right, but they aren't what I mean when I'm talking about an ecosystem.

 No, an ecosystem is the set of other services or software that spring up to support or integrate with the product.

 There's one immediate problem here that's obvious if you think about it. Much of the ecosystem thus exists to address flaws or gaps in the product. Something that is more polished, more mature, and more finished will provide fewer opportunities for other products to add value.

 What this means, then, is that a thriving ecosystem is often a sign of weakness and immaturity, not strength. A good product will not need the extras and hangers on that come with an ecosystem.

 The notion of an ecosystem is tied in with that of MVP - Minimum Viable Product. The current trend is to launch a startup with just an MVP, rely on first mover advantage, and hope to actually finish the offering at a later date. By definition, an MVP cannot be complete, and will need a surrounding ecosystem in order to function at all. This is much more common now than in the past, when products - especially proprietary products - were not launched until they were in some sense done.

 Over time, too, an ecosystem will - or should - naturally diminish, as bugs are fixed and missing features filled in. The partners in the ecosystem will get frozen out, as their offerings become irrelevant (think ClusterHQ).

 As an example from the past, consider the ecosystems that built up around Windows and DOS. Whole industries were built on things like TCP stacks and centralized nameservices and storage (PC-NFS, even Netware). These were products reliant on fundamental failings of the product they supported. (Don't even get me started on antivirus software.)

 Fast forward, and I can't be the only one to recognise the CNCF landscape as a disaster area.