Amazon - The Age of the PlatformThe Age of the Platform

Platforms and Guarantees

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

The Inherent Tension Between Management and Innovation

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

Innovation and the Case for the Platform

Bill Lee in a recent HBR article on customer platforms essentially makes the case for the platform. He writes:

The ability to make it easy for customers to alter products to better meet their needs is not confined to technology firms. Mid-tech, low-tech and no-tech firms have been doing the same thing for a

Reflections on the Six-Month Anniversary of the Book

I'm sitting in my backyard yesterday in quite the pensive mood. I'm thinking about the last six months, not coincidentally the amount of time since the book has been released. Without a doubt, there have been personal highs and lows. If there's been one thing that has sustained me through the latter, it's this: I'm right. The Age of Read More

Apple and Amazon: Competing Ecosystems

Check out this excellent piece in HBR by Ron Adner on two of the Gang of Four. To me, the key piece is this:

In the rush to match the pieces, most of Apple's rivals have missed the critical connections that draw the entire ecosystem together into a coherent whole.

In a word, yes! Apple understands the Read More

Platforms, Offense, and Defense

Now, no one will confuse AOL with the Gang of Four, but the company just bought local photo sharing site Hipster. I doubt that this move or any others will return AOL to a position of prominence. Rare is the company that can recover its previous mojo. Ditto Yahoo with its Facebook lawsuit. These companies' recent Read More

Are you willing to be misunderstood?

Here's an interesting quote from Jeff Bezos in a recent Economist article:

A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are is that we are willing to invent,” Mr Bezos told shareholders at Amazon’s annual meeting last year. “And very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods

Platforms Keep Colliding

Amazon may be the single biggest threat to a post-IPO Facebook based on patent issues. Apple rejects iBooks that contain links to Amazon books, as Seth Godin recently discovered. Google's trying to glean user information from Safari users. Apple's integrating Twitter heavily into its next operating system and keeping Facebook at a safe distance. In the Read More

Is Udemy a True Platform?

Just because you claim to be a platform doesn't make it so. Today, let's look at one company and see if it really qualifies as a platform. Udemy Udemy ("academy of you") bills itself as an online learning platform. It allows users to create their own courses for which they can charge whatever they want--or nothing at all. Read More

On Platforms and Choice

The CALSTR folks are upset that Facebook's board of directors is comprised of seven white men. There's not enough diversity, they say. That may well be true, but aren't Facebook's current powers that be in the best position to know what's good for Facebook? After all, they have done pretty well so far, right? And what Read More