Social Media Today had the opportunity to speak with author/speaker Phil Simon about his new book, The Age of the Platform...so we took it and it got us thinking.
SMT: I'm intrigued by your book. I've watched the evolution of what "platform" might be defined as. Platforms have end-to-end solutions. You've defined the Gang of Four as representing what a platform is.
PS: I do think there's a great degree of confusion and lack of clarity. I often feel like it's misused. Here are the "planks" in what I see as a platform.
Are they sort of modern day monopolies? I'm not a huge fan of jargon and I feel that a lot of people are just throwing it out there without properly understanding what it means.
SMT: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. They are all platforms but they have very different styles, core purposes and roots. Apple is a technology platform where everything is consistent from one device to another. Amazon began as an online book store where your fellow users became book reviewers, and that model has expanded into a store where you can buy and review anything. The Amazon Cloud is just a commercial use of the space they built out to support their online presence. Facebook had a social first cause. Google is embrancing social as an extension of its social search model.
When you talk about platforms for the future and what can be learned from these four examples, do what extent do social platforms separate themselves from these four that have become so essential?
PS: In terms of emerging platforms - WordPress and force.com - Salesforce - are up there. Twitter is the very definition of the platform. It's got the open APIs. Dorsey and Stone more or less said as much - we've built something but we don't know what it is. We make our APIs open and then other people can take it in different directions. And that's a key component of the most successful platforms.
Another term that gets bandied about alot is ecosystems. You look at the Gang of Four and they've done an exceptional job with this notion. I can build my own platform - and in fact I have. Three years ago I did one very specific type of consulting and over the last three years I've written four books, I started a publishing company, I do speaking and writing and different types of consulting, so I literally have created my own platform, but I wouldn't go so far as to say there's this gigantic ecosystem of people who are developing my platform for me. That's obviously very different than Twitter and Force.com.
Zynga is a key, I think, platform partner of Facebook. But even the owners of Zynga - which is about to go public - realize that it's dangerous to wed all their future to the Facebook platform. So now they have now gotten into bed with Google because Google wants to do more in gaming.
So there are certainly emerging platforms out there, but one of the things of which I'm most proud in the book is that there's not check list there. I can't tell you the 10 things you need to become the next Google. I'm just not that smart. I don't think there's a game plan to do it. And toward the end of the book I talk about how platforms - the Gang of Four in particular - really embrace uncertainty. You need the innovation to not only come from inside your walls but from outside your walls.
Now I, for example, am an Apple partner. I have in the App Store my book The New Small. So I can make money for Apple and Apple can make money for me. So this notion that you can't legislate innovation - it's going to come from different places. I just don't think that Steve Jobs thought, "Yeah, I bet if you let Angry Birds in the App Store it's gonna be downloaded 4 million times." That's what happened, but there's no way to have known that. So, to me, if you're really getting this notion of platforms right, you are...
...and it's not completely open. Apple is the very definition of a hybrid open/closed system. You can't just put anything in the App Store; there's an approval process. And that's a good thing, I would argue. You don't want child pornography or hate speech or things like that in the App Store. Now some companies aren't happy that it's closed because they submitted apps that weren't approved. So one of the other things I discuss in the book is this notion that platforms collide, not to mention that platforms are kind of political.
This turned out to be about a 300-page book. It could have been twice that long, but I just had to stop writing because things happen very quickly. Changes happen all the time. I was able to get the Amazon Fire and Jobs' unfortunate passing in the book before I went to print. But I realy believe that with this book I have not made the definitive statement on platforms. I think that I'm contributing something that's much needed.
Platforms will continue to evolve and that's been happening for a long time. You're a student of technology as well. Microsoft and MySpace and AOL and Yahoo 12 or 13 years ago you would have bet would be the lasting platforms today. Microsoft isn't going away, but if you look at their stock prices, those companies aren't on the same level as the Gang of Four.
SMT: The tendency now is to hedge your bets. Sharing sends content to all of these platforms. Facebook is as close as I've seen to creating its own independent Web, but even they understand that many people resist putting all their social eggs in the Facebook basket.
Take Oracle. For a very different customer base, they are obviously looking to put together a self-containe ecosystem. They just bought a big CRM system. Would you consider Oracle to be striving to build its own platform?
PS: MMMM. Yes and no. To me, your point about serving the different markets is a critical one. In my opinion, in the age of the platform, consumers are driving everything. That doesn't meant that enterprises are unimportant; of course they are. If you go back to the mid-1990s - what I call Web 1.0 - organizations were driving the technology. You used the best tech at your office, in your cube, on your desktop. I would argue that now that's not happening as much. You have app developers out there who are doing things that company IT departments can possibly attempt.
In my first book, Why New Systems Fail, big companies had a hard time getting ERP and CRM right. Well, business changes a lot faster. Companies like Genentech are developing internal app stores because they want their employees to be able to just go to their phone or tablet and there's the new app. They don't want to deal with a six-month to two-year deployment cycle. Tools like business intelligence and other sophisticated data mining apps have a lot of promise, but then if you look at statistics, a lot of those projects have failed.
So, to your point, Oracle is still doing things inside of large enterprises and Oracle isn't going away any more than Microsoft is, but if you're a really hot developer right now, do you want to work at Oracle, trying to integrate a bunch of different apps into this legacy mainframe, or do you want to be with a Zynga or working with WordPress or Amazon, Apple, Facebook or Twitter? The innovation is really coming from a lot of these external partners.
Now Oracle, to my knowledge, doesn't open up its API to the world at large. Ellison is notorious - he's suing Google right now for patent infringement. He's basically saying, "We have all the good ideas and if not, we'll buy a company." He's not saying to his developers, "Here's the software development kit. Here are some tools, here's the API. Go nuts."
That's not to say that all of the Gang of Four makes everything available because obviously they don't. Google protects its source code as well it should. But if you take a look at just the last two weeks, Google has made a couple of APIs open and available for Google +. They initially didn't do that because they wanted to test the waters a bit. But now that they've incorporated some feedback and found about about how people are actually using it - and have 40-45 million people on it - that's why there is no formula for building a platform.
Amazon - you were around as well as I, back in '94-'95 - was all about getting big fast. Look at Facebook back in 2000, 2001. Zuckerberg turned down students clamoring for Facebook because he didn't have the servers and the necessary infrastructure to build it, so the interesting thing in the book is that there is no one way to build a platform. There's an entire chapter of tips for small, medium and large businesses can use to embrace this notion of platforms, but this is not a tactical book.
Have you ever read The Long Tail by Chris Anderson? One of my favorites. To me that was very inspirational because he's laying out a new way of doing business but it's not like you look on page 220 of the book and there are the 10 things you need to do to be successful in the world of the long tail.
I really think that - and I read a lot of blog posts about the 10 things to do and the 5 mistakes to avoid, and I like them. But one of my favorite quotes on the back of my book is by Jay Baer who wrote, "Where some people see the trees, Phil Simon sees the forest." The book is not about 5 discrete events, it's about four companies and a new way of doing business, but then there are examples in the book of smaller companies like ??? and ??? and the company called HubSpot that get it. They want to build a platform. They want to create a very powerful ecosystem and embrace uncertainty and failure because there isn't a game plan.
Google + is not Google's first foray into social networking. In fact it's ???4 - you have Buzz, you have Orkut, you had Wave...so I don't think you can say, "These are the 5 things to do to build a platform. I just don't.
SMT: So would you say that The Age of the Platform is intrinsically connected to The Age of the App? Does a platform have to be that light on its feet?
PS: That's a really great question. I think apps are certainly important, but have what I consider to be a platform and I do have an app, but no, I wouldn't say apps are a necessary condition. It can probably help, but to me, Google adding Google + was critical because you need a social plank. Does Facebook need an e-commerce plank the same way that Amazon does? Well probably not, but Facebook is trying to monetize itself. And in fact, when Facebook goes public next year, I think the major reason for doing it is to have more funds available, right, so you can make some of the acquisitions that Oracle's making or Google or Amazon is making or Apple is making.
So I wouldn't say that it's essential, but to me, if you're trying to build yourself out as one of the most significant platforms and you don't have open APIs and apps and Web services, it's kind of hard for me to see you as a great platform. You need partners who can not only take your services in different directions, but also make money doing so.
If you look at Microsoft, as I argue in the book, yeah there were Microsoft partners and Microsoft built a platform, but Microsoft used to bully its partners and, I would argue in some cases, customers. So if you take a look at Google 10 years ago when it was basically just a search engine, not a platform like it is today, you kind of had to do business with Microsoft even if you didn't want to. But now there are alternatives to Window. There are alternatives to Office. So Microsoft is, in a way, paying for past sins.
You want there to be apps and developers, but you have to give people an incentive to want to build them. I have an app in the App Store and though I don't make a bunch of money from doing it, at least there's the potential. Giving Apple or Amazon a 30 percent cut for allowing me to sell my books or my apps on their platform is fine for me. I can go out and build my own bookstore if I want and spend $30,000, but who's really going to buy a book on the Phil Simon book store?
To me, a platform is just a set of integrated planks. So when people talk about the Google+ platform or the iPad platform, I say No, you're on the Google Platform, you're on the Apple Platform. I don't need a separate set of credentials to log into Google+ vs my normal Google account.
Phil's book is available on Amazon.