The long game

Platforms are long games.

If you are building a one-off consumer product that will not be maintained, improved, or ever change, then you probably don't need a platform.

However, if you are building an long-lived industrial product that will be maintained, or a series of related products, then it gets very expensive to start over every time.

To effectively maintain multiple unrelated products, or a system that that is difficult to update, improve, test, and deploy is a recipe for cripling technical debt.

The expectation today is things will improve over time, because software can be updated. It is not really optional any more.

And with the complexity of systems today, the odds you'll get perfect on the first release are near zero.

Build for the long game.