The Age of the Platform
My fourth and most ambitious book is called The Age of the Platform. It is about the platform as the most important business model of the 21st century and profiles Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. To my knowledge, this book is the only one of its kind.
Over the last five to seven years, these four companies have ascended to absolutely astounding heights. Yes, these companies excel via their superior use of technology. They have built incredible ecosystems. They’ve embraced partnerships and external innovation.
Beyond all of this, The Gang of Four has embraced an entirely new way of doing business: the platform.
A platform is simply a set of integrated planks. The most powerful platforms today have two things in common:
- They are rooted in equally powerful technologies—and their intelligent usage. In other words, they differ from traditional platforms in that they are not predicated on physical assets, land, and natural resources.
- They benefit tremendously from vibrant ecosystems (read: partners, developers, users, customers, and communities).
While platforms inhere a great deal of potential commercial appeal and applications, they do not exist simply as a means for companies to hawk their wares. At their core, platforms today are primarily about consumer utility and communications. Finally, because consumer tastes change much faster than business’ tastes, platforms today must adapt very quickly—or face obsolescence.
A DIFFERENT BUSINESS MODEL
In the 1990s, platforms and ecosystems were not nearly as powerful, robust, and vibrant as they are today. As I demonstrate in the book, it’s these connections between and among platforms and planks that allow Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google to:
- Innovate so quickly–and profoundly
- Rapidly deploy new integrated features
- Create and dominate new markets
Welcome to the Age of the Platform.
Note that I have launched a separate site for the book.
The Next Wave of Technologies 
My second book is about organizations’ efforts to adopt newer technologies such as open source, SaaS, clouds, mobility BI, open source, Agile, and SOA. Preview book in Google Books.
Why New Systems Fail
My first book exposes the root causes of system failures and what organizations can do to avoid them. The new edition of the book is a marked improvement over its predecessor and contains more than 70 new pages.
