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In How to Make Your Big Idea Really Happen, John Hagel III and John Seely Brown write about the need to build platforms, critical mass, ensure mutual benefit, etc. From the piece:
Thanks to the ubiquity of online communities, the virtual ties we form today are often as strong as those we create in-person. World
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Interesting post on ReadWriteWeb about the post-app economy. Dan Rowinski writes that, "content publishers, retail businesses and restaurants are slowly realizing that they do not need to have a presence in the App Store to build a successful mobile presence." No argument here. My question, though, is, "What about consumers"? Circumventing apps stores works for jailbreakers and other technical Read More
Turns out that the recent Mac malware attack didn't just affect Mac users. (Is anything isolated these days?) Some hackers were effectively robbing Google of advertising dollars by redirecting clicks from infected Mac OS X machines and stealing the ad revenue. Google will survive but the premise here is interesting. Less-than-scrupulous folks can exploit the space between platforms. Read More
Google has taken criticism for its recent and controversial stock split. Some wonder if Mark Zuckerberg's 57 percent of voting power in post-IPO Facebook is too much. I don't. Each company wants to prevent a Dan-Loeb-type situation. And it should. Activist shareholders waging proxy fights distract companies from the real work at hand. And that work is never finished in Read More
Innovation means failure. Always has. Management at the vast majority of large, conservative companies serve to minimize failure. Companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have built great platforms because their leaders understand that, to innovate, you have to embrace intelligent risk and uncertainty. And I'm hardly the only one to notice. Ron Ashkenas writes about the difficulty that Read More
Eric Jackson on Forbes writes about some pretty uncanny ways in which Google resembles Microsoft circa 1999. To me, this is kind of like comparing the assassinations of Presidents Kennedy and Lincoln. Eerie similarities, but I don't believe that the Google brass is nearly as complacent as Microsoft in 1999. Remember, Apple was all but dead then and Read More
In this fascinating interview with Charlie Rose (about 40 minutes in), Jack Dorsey of Twitter explains the evolution of the company. Particularly interesting is his disclosure that many Twitter innovations came from users (read: the @ symbol, hashtags, and the concept of a retweet.) In the Age of the Platform, you can embrace ecosystems like Twitter Read More
Will Wheaton is angry about a more Plus-centric Google. He's used to using Google in a certain way, a way free from near-constant suggestions about upgrades and +1's. People hate change and, for platform companies, it’s a fine line between evolution/progress and annoying your user base. You want to adapt and innovate without being intrusive. It’s much Read More
“We are open to anything."
--Eric Migicovsky
The Pebble Watch has raised more than $8 million on Kickstarter as of this writing. Not bad, considering that the original goal was $100,000. Now, apps are coming. Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky's quote above epitomizes the Age of the Platform. You think that Migicovsky expected this type of success? Embrace the uncertainty. Let the Read More
Thorsten Heins, the 54-year-old chief executive officer of Research In Motion (RIMM) talks in this Mashable piece about how his company "is not leaving the consumer business." My gut reaction upon reading that: It doesn't matter. The consumer business is leaving you. In the Age of the Platform, you can either make it easy or difficult for people to embrace Read More
Read my Inc. Magazine column: All About the Platform.
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