Vviewpoints
DOI: 10.1145/1924421.1924433
Technology Strategy
and management
Platform wars come
to Social media
The world can absorb more social media sites, but how many?
IllustratIon by John hersey
OVER ThE PAST half-century, we have seen a dramatic evolution in computing and communications plat- forms. Thesehavechanged
our lives first in the research lab and
the corporate office, then in the home,
and now everywhere. In the 1960s
and 1970s, we saw the emergence of
timesharing systems over mainframe
computers and their private networks.
In the 1980s, we saw the birth of networked personal computers and workstations as well as advances in home-use recording and playback devices for
multimedia. In the 1990s, we had an explosion of activity on the Internet with
the Web as a graphical user interface.
In the 2000s, we have seen enormous
activity—email, texting, Web searching, sharing of photos and digital music files, location-based services, and
many other applications—on laptops
and mobile devices, especially smartphones. And, increasingly over the past
decade, but especially over the past several years, we have seen the emergence
of social networking systems ranging
from MySpace to Facebook, LinkedIn,
Twitter, and Foursquare, as well as
Groupon (which recently turned down
a $6.5 billion purchase offer from
Google).
Social media networks are, in different degrees, new kinds of platforms that
facilitate communication and offer new
systems for texting and sending email
as well as sharing files. They enable
computing through access to differ-
ent applications and databases. What
is less well understood is how these
platforms compete for user attention
and revenue with other computing and
communications platforms, such as for
personal computing (Microsoft Win-
dows and the Apple Macintosh), general
mobile communications (RIM Black-
berry, Nokia Symbian, Google Android,
Microsoft Windows, and others), tra-
ditional email (Microsoft Outlook and
Google Gmail), Internet search (Google,
Firefox, Microsoft Bing), and file shar-
ing (Flickr, among others). There truly is
a new war going on, with lots of players
and no clear path to victory.
