Platform Ecosystem Strategy

When I started in partnerships all those years ago, there was no "playbook" to create successful partnerships. This post contains everything I wish I knew.

From enabling passengers to embark and disembark trains, to vertebra-crushing shoes, and operating systems like Microsoft Windows, “platform” has been used to describe many different things, in many different contexts, over a long period of time.

“Never before have SaaS companies spent SO MUCH for SO LITTLE!” With one LinkedIn line, David Spitz described the biggest challenge in SaaS.

I’ve grown fond of comparing platform economies with real world economies. “Platforms” are fairly abstract things - intangible for most - so relating them with familiar concepts and principles makes them easier to understand.

It’s been fun to watch the growth of Threads. Earning 20% of the weekly active user base of Twitter within two weeks is impressive, even for Zuck.

Half-way through 2012, you’d have been forgiven for thinking that Facebook was doing a MySpace. In other words, Facebook was on a fast path to slow, painful decline.

In late 2016, whilst leading the Developer Platform team at Intercom, I published a blog post titled “Browsers, not apps, are the future of mobile.”

In early 2018 the city of San Jose — deep in California’s Santa Clara Valley — hosted two events a week apart that together signalled the most significant shift in a behaviour for over a decade.

Beginning his 15 minute talk at the the 2010 TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, England, author and journalist Matt Ridley compared side-by-side an Acheulean hand axe from half a million years ago, and a modern computer mouse.