Thanks to the ubiquity of online communities, the virtual ties we form today are often as strong as those we create in-person. World of Warcraft guilds, for example, are extremely committed online groups that work collectively to solve complex problems. Creating a virtual gathering spot can help people who want to contribute but may not be able to meet at a specific time and place. It also provides a way to keep people engaged and contributing in between the meetings held in physical space. As with platforms in shaping strategies for companies, the key is to be creative about helping to reduce barriers to interaction and significantly reduce the investment required to participate as well as accelerating and amplifying the rewards of participation.

It’s a good article, but I have one fundamental criticism: Aren’t these necessary but insufficient conditions for success? What about luck?

Platforms guarantee nothing. Ditto critical mass and the authors’ other recommendations. These things all help but they merely serve to increase the odds of success.

No argument here. My question, though, is, “What about consumers”? Circumventing apps stores works for jailbreakers and other technical folks. But most laypeople just want to click on a few buttons to play a game or access content. Anything beyond that tends to get dismissed as too complicated. The relative security of Apple’s hybrid open-closed model seems to work for most, even if purists scoff at the company’s restrictiveness. The Wild Wild West of Android doesn’t seem to be the answer.

Are apps here to stay? I doubt it. Nothing in the Age of the Platform lasts forever. Whatever replaces app stores and apps, though, must be as user-friendly as possible.

Google will survive but the premise here is interesting. Less-than-scrupulous folks can exploit the space between platforms. Apple and Google may be frenemies (depending on the day of the week), but hacker-types are finding ways to game the system.

You can try to prevent this, but don’t think for a minute that you can eliminate these types of issues. The fleas come with the dog.

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 the Age of the Platform–particularly for a company struggling as much as Yahoo! is. Employees at Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have way too many other, more important, things to do.

Every minute, every dollar that Yahoo!’s management spends on Loeb represents opportunity costs. Rather than forging ahead, Yahool! has to deal with yet another crisis (admittedly of its own doing).

And I’m hardly the only one to notice. Ron Ashkenas writes about the difficulty that managers have innovating on HBR.

What prevents companies from innovating better? One possibility is that managers don’t really want their people to innovate, no matter what they say otherwise. Take time utilization: How many hours per day, week, or month are you encouraged to think creatively, or work on innovation? Companies like 3M and Google that allow employees to carve off a certain percentage of their paid time for innovation are rare. Most other firms want their people to stay focused on today’s business — and only work on innovation in their spare time. So in the end, it’s a mixed message: “We want you to innovate, but only after you’ve done your real job.”

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 Netscape was the only thing resembling a rival back then.

Google was built on disintermediation and disruption and the company is not taking its dominance in search for granted. Look at the different planks in its platform. Google is trying to be so much more than search. Whether it’s ultimately successful is anyone’s guess, but Larry and Sergey understand that the world in five years probably won’t look too much like the world today.

In the Age of the Platform, the long-term is much shorter.

In the Age of the Platform, you can embrace ecosystems like Twitter or you can cling to traditional ways of doing things like the publishing industry.

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 more art than science. Amazon, Apple, Google, Twitter, and Facebook all face the same fundamental problem. Everyone has a voice today.

The fleas come with the dog.

–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 ecosystem take your company, your platform in new and exciting directions.

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 your platform and products. Offer carrots and/or sticks. Be prepared when those don’t work–or work as expected.

Just don’t think that top-down decisions rule the day. Today, it’s decidedly not about controlling the environment and the ecosystem. In a very real sense, they control you.