The building a Platform is a cooperative effort with financial incentives associated with wealth sharing that are compelling. “The ability for an increased number of actors to innovate separately on different modules of systems is radically altering the nature and stability of relationships between firms that make core products and the developers of complementary products.” For example, IBM platform of hardware and software was most internally development. When the PC Junior was introduced with the DOS operating system, external parties clone the hardware and DOS, not being contractual obligated to a hardware platform flourished. Intel’s vision of a chipset, bus, usb, and graphic accelerator architecture provided the platform for thousands of software applications the leverage the benefits of standardization interfaces with hardware, sdks, and component reuse. A platform leader can benefit and maybe highly dependant on innovations developed at other firms. “No single company can replicate all the innovative capabilities of the market.” “As a result, nearly all the platform leader we observed have had to work closely with other firms to create initial applications and then new generations of complementary products.” Cooperation means getting a bigger piece of pie. Industries that center their business on platform products receive an increase in value of the platform as more incentives increase for complimentary products and this stimulates more people to buy or use the core product.[Learn More ...]

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