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The Age of the Platform: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Have Redefined Business Paperback – Illustrated, October 22, 2011

by Phil Simon (Author), Mitch Joel (Foreword)
3.6 3.6 out of 5 stars 150 ratings
See all formats and editions
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Winner, Axiom Business Book Awards: 2011 Best Business Technology Book Buoyed by the success of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, thousands of companies of all sizes are fundamentally rethinking how they do business. They are creating vibrant ecosystems and, in the process, reaping big rewards. In the tradition of The Long Tail, The Age of the Platform demonstrates how the world of business today is vastly different from that of even ten years ago. Today, the most successful companies are operating under an entirely different business model-one predicated on collaboration, emerging technologies, externally driven innovation, different types of partnerships, and vibrant ecosystems. Rife with examples, The Age of the Platform is nothing less than essential reading to understand business today--and where it is going.
Previous page
  1. Print length
    312 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Motion Publishing
  4. Publication date
    October 22, 2011
  5. Dimensions
    5.5 x 0.71 x 8.5 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0982930259
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0982930250
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Essential reading on the state of business today-and where it is going. Ignore this book at your own peril."-Adrian C. Ott, award-winning author, The 24-Hour Customer

"The Age of the Platform is the kind of book to read if you want to better understand the Internet and how your company can fit into it and create a business model to profit from it."-Anita Campbell, co-author of Visual Marketing

"Nothing short of a 21st-century business survival guide."-Mike Faith, CEO & President, Headsets.com

"Phil Simon sees a forest when the rest of us just see trees. In this compelling mix of research and interpretation, Simon shows how the future of business isn't just technology, but its tentacles."
-Jay Baer, co-author of The NOW Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter, and More Social.

From the Author

Buoyed by the success of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, companies of all sizes are fundamentally rethinking how they do business. They are creating vibrant ecosystems, and in the process, reaping big rewards. In the tradition of The Long Tail, The Age of the Platform demonstrates how the world of business today is vastly different from that of even ten years ago. Today the most successful companies are operating under an entirely different business model-one predicated on collaboration, rapid development, emerging technologies, and externally driven innovation. The Age of the Platform introduces and describes a critical new business model, one essential to survive in today's increasingly fragmented and dynamic economy.

Without question, the Gang of Four has 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 defined 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.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Motion Publishing; revised edition (October 22, 2011)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 312 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0982930259
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0982930250
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.3 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.71 x 8.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.6 3.6 out of 5 stars 150 ratings

About the author

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Phil Simon

Phil Simon

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Phil Simon is the world's leading independent expert on workplace collaboration and technology. He is the award-winning author of 14 books, most recently The Nine: The Tectonic Forces Reshaping the Workplace. Simon helps organizations communicate, collaborate, and use technology better. Harvard Business Review, the MIT Sloan Management Review, Wired, NBC, CNBC, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and The New York Times have featured his contributions. He also hosts the podcast Conversations About Collaboration.

Customer reviews

3.6 out of 5 stars
3.6 out of 5
150 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Andrew Karpie
5.0 out of 5 stars The Age of the Platform: Phil Simon Serves An Epic Feast To Business Readers
Reviewed in the United States on November 8, 2011
Verified Purchase
Phil Simon's recent book, The Age of the Platform: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Have Redefined Business, is an excellent, much-needed -- almost epic -- overview of (what I would term) "modern platform businesses," with particular focus on four of the largest and most well-known.

I would highly recommend this book for business people and students of business and economics who are new to understanding this modern form of business that continues to evolve and take shape.

Simon asserts that while "platforms" of different kinds have been exploited for business purposes for a very long time, it is only recently that (a) a new generation of platforms has emerged from a confluence of information technology and other trends/factors and (b) a new generation of businesses have been and are emerging/evolving by leveraging these new platforms in radical and often extraordinarily successful ways.

The examples of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google (the "Gang of Four") are held up as archetypes, and their courses thoroughly charted. Some less successful modern platforms (for example, Yahoo) are also cited and commented on here and there, and a set of potential "up and comers" (for example, Foursquare) are catalogued.

I particularly like Simon's differentiation of the platforms themselves and the businesses that have developed and steered them to their business advantage. This is perhaps one of the essential points that define what makes "modern platform businesses" unique and different from traditional businesses (i.e., the openness to/enablement of integration and interactions with customers/users and a range of ecosystem collaborators, the varying degrees of ownership and control of the business over "platform assets: and what is created out of them, etc.).

Simon offers a very robust, comprehensive, general definition of this entity, called a platform, which modern businesses are establishing and leveraging (and which, at best, is barely separable from the ecosystems they engender):

QUOTE: "This text defines a platform as an extremely valuable and powerful ecosystem that [...] scales, morphs, and incorporates new features (called planks in this book), users, customers, vendors, and partners. Today, the most powerful platforms 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.

The most vibrant platforms embrace third-party collaboration. The companies behind these platforms seek to foster symbiotic and mutually beneficial relationships with users, customers, partners, vendors, developers, and the community at large.
Even though a great deal of potential commercial appeal and applications inhere in them, platforms do not exist simply as a means of vendors to hawk their wares. At their core, platforms today are primarily about consumer utility and communications.
[...]
Platforms comprise individual components, features, products, and services--collectively referred to in this book as planks. Put simply, without planks, there are no platforms. [...] First, useful and popular planks give platforms their power. Second, today a company's platform need not consist of only its own tools, applications, and innovations. On the contrary, platforms can easily and quickly integrate extremely powerful planks from the outside--that is, developers, partners, prosumers, and other third parties." END QUOTE (Simon, The Age of the Platform, pgs. 22-23)

Modern platforms and the businesses (companies) that succeed at mastering them are a different species from what has gone before, not just an evolutionary extension. Simon addresses this subject of "modern platform businesses" without entanglement in the earlier literature of product platforms, etc..

On the one hand, I think the book could have been stronger had it drawn selectively on the platform research within economics and management science over the past decade. But on the other hand, by not doing so, it is able to present a perspective on "modern platform businesses" in a clear and "bracketed" way that allows readers to contemplate this phenomenon, without distraction from past generations of concepts and from academic theories and ideas that may be obtuse for business readers.

The book dissects its vast subject matter in a series of rapier stokes -- reducing it to a set of concatenated, bite-sized tableaus, each treating some aspect or facet of this complex, evolving business phenomenon. And this approach and lively style is, I think, well-tuned for business readers.

Phil Simon has set the table well and offers an expansive, small-plate feast for business readers who are newly developing a taste and sensibility for modern platform businesses. His book brings into focus a significant transformation in business models that is now happening and which we will try to understand for years to come.

Bon Appetit!

[...]
2 people found this helpful
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R Gogulapati
4.0 out of 5 stars The Age of Platform is essential text book material for growing talent
Reviewed in the United States on July 31, 2023
Verified Purchase
Digital initiatives of firms and platform topics continue to capture attention and raise questions for the experts and novices for more than a decade and half. The table of contents of this book conveyed the relevance of the topics for businesses and societies then and continue to draw attention now. Once again, I went back to the first edition of Phil Simon’s book to take note and notice the topics chosen for this book, along with his other earlier published work “Why New Systems fail, theory and practice collide “ and the ”Next Wave of Technologies, Opportunities in Chaos” (2009)
I read and used this book along with the author's work mentioned above for facilitating about future readiness of business professionals in my workshops. Those workshops were part of introducing business students about Business Information Systems and trends. Several topics were covered on small, medium and enterprise strength systems, data management, customer success related topics, and what the future holds in the midst of outsourcing, globalization, and articles storming the popular press such as Nicholas Carr’s “IT does n’t matter”.
The themes chosen by Phil Simon are of primary importance to convey the global, transformational phenomenon of platforms, about impact with value creation and capture in a choice space resulting in ultra successes and ultra sensational news of confusion and concerns.
The data and antitrust topics, the digital divide with serious concerns of fractured geopolitical internet are pervasive, impacting belief systems of long standing institutions, require an all rounded and in depth review of the topics to build future talent, prepare the aspiring practitioners, researchers and academics systemic and holistic outlook for these complex topics.
I skimmed once again with inquiry on what struggling B2B and B2C firms, their leaders, employees, and customers big and small can learn from the lessons of the Gang of Four as well as those new and incumbent firms standing the tests of turbulence for their own transformational initiatives.

While there are good definitions and basic understanding of platforms thru proliferation of literature on digital and platform topics – much can be done to raise the bar for growing talent across the globe to meet the challenges ahead for the novice and aspiring professionals of the IS/ IT field who meet customers inquiries head on, on a day to day basis to bring themselves and their customers up to speed. For introducing the importance of grasping the vastness of platforms topics, I think Phil Simon’s work is key for training for talent growth around the globe.
I include a few questions and suggestions for future updates of this book in this review here.

How can the old traditional battles subside on monopolies, misunderstanding the positive intent and power that technologies push forward and leap frog the human race? How can education help to lay an easier path to navigate the difficult paradigm shifts for the impacted ?

Why do every great initiative of technological power meet with several stages of obstacles, failures, layoffs, lack of trust and raising even more barriers to cross to miss a generation of talent preparedness across the globe?

Data (and ecosystem) topics requires a special chapter from Big Data, Analytics, business intelligence progress to the added challenges of human and artificial collaboration from design to development of products and services. Design issues and methods for new platforms and products of the platform age require special treatise in this book.
The complex nature of the networked organizational and social systems needs to be highlighted.
I recommend more diagrams to make it easy on the novices for clarity.
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Top reviews from other countries

Cliente Amazon
1.0 out of 5 stars Phil Simon says alot and yet nothing.
Reviewed in Italy on August 6, 2016
Verified Purchase
The author says alot and with alot i mean too much yet all those words and sentences don't hold deepness: what he practically says is more his subjective opinions (which obviously can and actually do differ from the reality) than what facts say. I'd recommend him to read more scientific papers on platforms, networks and please buy a grammar dictionary and get yourself a better editor. There's nothing new in this book, it's all stuff that's been going around since 2000 for instance check Annabelle Gawer and Cusumano's work. In short i'm really disappointed because i spent my money to buy something unvaluable, the index is really tricky, all those good titles of chapters and paragraphs made me curious. For example there are 2 paragraphs about platforms and technology and Phil writes alot there giving the same old examples and quoting authors here and there but all that sums up to nothing. The book might be useful if you're intereted in "the gang of four" (they're not even a gang because they're separate companies....)and their history but trust me this is all stuff you can find online.
2 people found this helpful
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Josep Bonet
4.0 out of 5 stars We all need a platform
Reviewed in Germany on January 3, 2014
Verified Purchase
Very interesting book. It analyses the reasons why the 'Gang of Four?, Amazon, Google, Apple and Facebook, have change the modern business environment. Phil Simon shows why platforms are important and why all businesses should try to build up their platforms.
I recommend it.
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M. Yeager
5.0 out of 5 stars Accurately charting the future of the service provider market and relevance in the customer centric 'post product' world.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 13, 2012
Verified Purchase
It is a no hyperbole to call this a seminal work.

I am already buying copies for my team, customers, our executive team ... you get the point!

The world is rapidly bifurcating into the 'have a platform' ...the Amazons, Apples, and Googles so accuratley and exhaustingly described in the book ...and the 'have nots' ...in my case, the major pan European service provider whom I work for as a Chief Technologist. Although, I would hasten to add, in our case we are less a 'have not' and more a 'not yet'!

This highly lucid and easy to follow book does a fantastic job of laying out just what this means and why the battle lines are being rightly drawn within open source, the 'big vendors', et al as we rapidly shift into services and customer centric delivery ...you could almost have entitled this book, 'What Happens After the Hype of Cloud'.

I fundamentally believe that, for service providers of any description to be relevant in the market moving forward, they must embrace the concept of the platform, why this structure is core to true customer cemtric services delivery, and then execute efficiently and urgently against such a strategy.

As one of my favourite passages in the book so succinctly captures, 'By themselves, platforms guarantee nothing. They increase the probability of future success, minimize risk and spur innovation, and reduce time to market. All else being equal, companies that embrace platforms will continue to do better than cling to antiquated blueprints.'

This may be the first, last, and best word on what comes next in the world of technology.
One person found this helpful
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Jock
4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 5, 2015
Verified Purchase
Good take on the Platform world 4 years ago, by gum its moved on !!!! AWS $5Billion
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Germany Customer
4.0 out of 5 stars power of platforms...
Reviewed in Germany on October 1, 2013
Verified Purchase
nice biz book about power of platforms...using the four companies as per title... some content not new..but still good one to read .
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