Vviewpoints
DOI: 10.1145/1629175.1629189
technology strategy
and Management
the evolution
of platform thinking
How platform adoption can be an important determinant
of product and technological success.
In seVeRAL oF my prior publica- tions, including my Communi- cations columns on Microsoft, Apple, and Google, I have ar- gued that companies in the
information technology business are
often most successful when their products become industrywide platforms.
The term “platform,” though, is used
in many different contexts and can be
difficult to understand. I am currently
finishing a book on best-practice ideas
in strategy and innovation, and include
a chapter on how platform thinking
has evolved.
1 This column summarizes
some of my findings.
Most readers have probably heard
the term platform used with reference
to a foundation or base of common
components around which a company
might build a series of related products. This kind of in-house “product
platform” became a popular topic in
the 1990s for researchers exploring the
costs and benefits of modular product
architectures and component reuse.
2
I was among this group, having studied reusable components and design
frameworks in Japanese software factories, reusable objects at Microsoft,
and reusable underbody platforms at
automobile manufacturers.
3
Product versus industry Platforms
In the mid- and late 1990s, various researchers and industry observers, including myself, also began discussing
technologies such as Microsoft Windows and the personal computer, as
well as the browser and the Internet, as
“industrywide platforms” for information technology. Most of us saw the PC
as competing with an older industry
platform—the IBM System 360 family
of mainframes. It took a few more years
to devise frameworks to help managers
use the concept of an industry platform
more strategically. One of my doctoral
students, Annabelle Gawer, took on
this challenge for her MIT dissertation
in the late 1990s, which became the
basis for our 2002 book, Platform Lead-
ership: How Intel, Microsoft, and Cisco
Drive Industry Innovation. In this book
and subsequent articles we tried to
clarify the characteristics of a product
versus an industry platform.
4
Gawer and I argued that an industry platform has two essential differences. One is that, while it provides a
common foundation or core technology that a firm can reuse in different
product variations, similar to an in-house product platform, an industry
platform provides this function as part
of a technology “system” whose components are likely to come from different companies (or maybe different departments of the same firm), which we
called “complementors.” Second, the
industry platform has relatively little
value to users without these complementary products or services. So, for
example, the Windows-Intel personal
computer or a smartphone are just
boxes with relatively little or no value
without software development tools
and applications or wireless telephony