Actually, Yahoo has been a pretty developer-friendly company - for a while the geocoding service had less restrictive TOS than Google's; Pipes is pretty nifty; YUI, while a bit too verbose for my taste, is very well-designed; and of course, Douglas Crockford, the father of JSON, works at Yahoo.
This doesn't obviate OP's point - that closing a bunch of services makes developers less inclined to build on your platform. But I'm not sold on the idea that this will irrevocably alienate developers.
Besides, as Apple proves every day, developers can hate your guts but still jump on cue if the platform is good enough.
"Besides, as Apple proves every day, developers can hate your guts but still jump on cue if the platform is good enough."
It's not about being good. If it is, developers would be all over the WebOS platform. It's because the App Store still generates the most revenue for most developers.
Right, it's the distribution. Desktop developers have been willing to shell-out a lot for Visual Studio because they needed to build Windows applications for wide adoption.
That makes it all the more tragic. They hold so much potential to be a great technology company with such programming talent, but the executives constantly shy away from it, apparently searching for profits in less technical avenues. #2 in search? Better quit. #1 in bookmarking! Pull the plug. Yahoo even had the most visitors in the world at one time. And the millions of eyeballs are treated to vanilla news and email for a decade plus.
This doesn't obviate OP's point - that closing a bunch of services makes developers less inclined to build on your platform. But I'm not sold on the idea that this will irrevocably alienate developers.
Besides, as Apple proves every day, developers can hate your guts but still jump on cue if the platform is good enough.