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March 28, 2005
Platform companies are everywhere...is your company a platform?
I had to check to see if I was at the right event; but last week’s SD Forum conference on Software as a Service had no web/software services companies. Each one was a technology “platform.” Not in the old sense of a hardware platform but in the latest, cool sense, a platform for a community of users and businesses.
At the SD Forum, Marc Benioff, CEO of SalesForce.com was the first to call his company a platform company because he was the first speaker of the day. Marc used to run an ASP company, then he was head of a web services company, and now he is chief of a platform company. The same company of course, it’s just that "platform" is where you want to be in the digital thought leadership stakes.
That’s because Flickr, the recent Yahoo acquisition is trés cool, and trés platform, and so is del.icio.us; and so anybody on the cutting edge is a platform company by definition.
At the SD Forum someone from the audience pointed out that there used to be hundreds of “platform” companies, all the B-to-B marketplaces that were going to be platforms for commerce. It’s a fair point: just offering a technology platform does not mean communities will naturally arise around it.
Companies can call themselves platform companies if they want the latest bandwagon or buzz word. But they had better also show that they have open technology platforms, viable communities using their platform, and most importantly, that those communities are creating improvements to the platform.
This is a much different business model than the standard software business models, including web services, ASP, and enterprise.
(Up next: IBM strategist tells SVW Big Blue's platform plans...)
cd1755
March 28, 2005 07:00 AM
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