Apple - 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

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

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

The Problem with Ubiquity

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

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

GE vs. Apple

Steve Denning of Forbes asks the following about two successful companies:

Why doesn’t GE amaze us like Apple? Obviously in any firm as large as GE, there pockets of innovation. The Ecomagination program is one positive sign, Maybe there are others. Based on the information released by GE, we don’t know the full story.

In Read More

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

Platform Lessons from Steve Jobs

If you haven't read Walter Isaacson's book Steve Jobs (affiliate link), then you probably should. There's a reason that it has sold more than three million copies. Now Isaacson's back at it, talking about his new article on management lessons from Apple's iconic leader in HBR. Check out the video below from his recent Charlie Rose appearance. (Isaacson 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

Ecosystems, Innovation, and Protecting Platforms

Check out this interesting Forbes' piece on what could kill Apple, Google, and Facebook by Rob Enderle. On Apple, Enderle writes that the company's success

...is a result of three things: A sharp focus on a very distinct consumer buyer, monetizing and assuring the entire user experience, and the best balance between engineering, design, services and marketing