Caterina of Flickr posted on how QOOP dealt with Flickr simply by building a service on their API rather than pursuing formal partnering and concluded with the following paragraph 

Traditional business development meant spending a lot of money on dry cleaning, animating your powerpoint, drinking stale coffee in windowless conference rooms and scouring the thesaurus looking for synonyms for “synergy”. Not to mention trying to get hopelessly overbooked people to return your email. And then after the deal was done, squabbling over who dealt with the customer service. Much, much better this way! 

Fred of Union Square Ventures gives several other examples of where he has seen similar things at work.

The falling cost of launching a service has been well documented.  Now the world is becoming more open the cost of business development is falling too.  That’s great – it’s getting cheaper and cheaper to build businesses.  Venture capital becomes more about small investments to get companies started and cash out deals when they are a bit bigger.