Jan Bosch
During the last weeks, I reflected on the research activities in the Software Center for which I am the director and I realized that everything we do with the partner companies and the universities is concerned with increasing the pace at which we are delivering new value to customers. Whereas most companies, a decade ago, … Read more
Although platforms can be used purely for internal purposes, many reach a point where they’re opened up to third parties, becoming an ecosystem platform. Ecosystem platforms serve, by definition, two- or multi-sided markets. This means that you have multiple stakeholder groups to support to make the platform successful. When thinking about ecosystem platforms, I often … Read more
Every platform company I’ve worked with would love to open up their platform to third parties and get ‘free’ functionality extensions. Especially the idea of a multi-sided platform where different parties exchange value with each other and you collect a nice slice of each transaction comes across as a highly desirable state of being where … Read more
In earlier posts, I’ve introduced the Three Layer Product Model (3LPM). Similar to all other software, platforms have three layers of functionality: innovative and experimental, differentiating and commodity. Functionality typically starts as innovative and, when it resonates with customers, becomes differentiating. The differentiating functionality drives sales and market share, causing competitors to develop similar functionality … Read more
Software platforms by their very nature support multiple products. Typically, these products are used in different contexts and configurations. As a consequence, the platform has to offer variation points that allow each product and customer to use the platform in the way that best suits their purposes. Each variation point then has two or more … Read more
The idea behind platforms is to share functionality between different products and make it available to as many customers as efficiently and quickly as possible. This is one driver for continuously incorporating new features into the platform. Incorporating new features can be done using a product-first approach or a platform-first approach. In the product-first approach, … Read more
The traditional view on platforms is one where the platform provides generic functionality used by multiple products in a portfolio and family. These products can then simply take the platform as a lego brick and build their product-specific functionality on top of it. Like software from external providers, you simply integrate the platform as a … Read more
Traditional thinking is that platforms are about efficiency through reuse. Product teams get a bunch of functionality for free from the platform and only have to build the remaining product-specific functionality. The interesting thing about software reuse is that it’s been extremely successful at the inter-company level. The amount of software that’s being reused through … Read more
One company I worked with analyzed the businesses they had tried to build over the years. Their analysis showed that the most successful business inside the walls of an already highly successful company took, on average, 7 years to reach 50 million in revenue. And this was with the entire weight, network and customer base … Read more
Many of the founders I work with are interested in finding a way to become a platform company. Having customers and complementors engage with each other and taking a cut of each transaction is an incredibly attractive concept that anyone in their right mind would love to realize. It feels like a money-printing machine that … Read more
