3 Mar 2010
Evolving into a platform, Part Deux
I think my last post tried to say too much and failed so I’d like to explore a few more things related to being a platform vs. building an app.
The first was the bit about “building a platform to for others to innovate on, rather than providing those innovations…themselves” This of course does not mean that providing a platform is not innovating; in fact, innovating by creating a novel platform design is the only reason you would go down the route of building a platform for others, because if you can’t innovate, then why would anyone build on you vs. building the platform for themself and eliminating a dependency?
The second point is related to the issue of whether becoming a platform is possible in every app domain. After tossing this around in my head today, the only thing that’s become clear to me is that some applications are semi-platforms and make this distinction blurrier than I thought. Photoshop has a thriving add-in market. Does that make it a platform? I’d say yes, but of course it’s not a platform in the sense that Windows is a platform. A developer probably couldn’t write a Google Talk instant messaging client for Adobe Photoshop. You might ask “well, would they want to?” and I’d say that’s irrelevant; there are plenty of things that developers want to do on the iPhone that they can’t because of sandboxing restrictions, but it’s definitely still a platform. Perhaps the difference is whether being a platform gives a company a competitive advantage; in Microsoft’s case, having a ton of apps and being the enabler for those apps through awesome development tools is a competitive advantage; for Adobe, their competitive muscle comes mostly from the expertise that is embedded in Photoshop itself, and the platform aspect is secondary.
The third point, and hopefully the one that makes the above two a little less academic, is whether they give any insight into current applications and whether they can grow more valuable to users by being a platform. I’m going to save it for another post because I’m practicing brevity :-)
