On Platforms & Ecosystems (drafting)

Sean Horgan

It’s important to think about platforms and ecosystems together as platforms by themselves aren’t useful unless someone is using them.

The term platform is thrown around in product marketing material to the point that its requires further definition. I like Bill Gates’s take: “A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it”. Ben Thompson offers a great post with more on this definition in

The Bill Gates Line⁠

⁠

You can find more of his thinking here:

https://stratechery.com/outline/platforms-and-ecosystems/⁠

⁠

According to Ben Thompson, another dominant force in technology are aggregators which attract end users by virtue of their inherent usefulness:

⁠

I largely subscribe to Ben’s

Aggregation Theory⁠

but I think aggregators often act like platforms as they extend out to adjacent markets.

Platform as a Garden

From Alex Komoroske’s Gardening Platforms (

komoroske.com/gardening-platforms⁠

⁠

Screen Shot 2024-10-28 at 6.54.32 PM.png

⁠

Screen Shot 2024-10-31 at 11.12.41 AM.png

⁠

Screen Shot 2024-10-28 at 6.55.44 PM.png

⁠

Dealing with legacy platforms

Legacy platforms imply that there is a new platform on the table or at least on the horizon. It’s first worth the effort to diagnose the problems with the existing stack

⁠

https://jonnyleroy.com/2011/02/03/dealing-with-creaky-legacy-platforms/⁠

⁠

Platform as a Garden

Dealing with legacy platforms

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.