Invisible Engines: How Software Platforms Drive Innovation and Transform Industries

Another way to solve the problem of getting the two sides on board simultaneously is to invest to lower the costs of consumers on one side of the market. As we saw earlier, for instance, Microsoft invests in the creation of software tools that make it easier for application developers to write application software for Microsoft operating systems an

ensure that Apple doesn’t lose revenues to others. Thus Apple has adopted a “give away the blades and sell the razor” strategy. That pricing strategy is unique among the industries we have considered.

Palm, on the other hand, regrouped. It surveyed Zoomer buyers to find out what they liked and didn’t like, what they used and didn’t use: What these people said opened the company’s eyes. More than 90% of Zoomer owners also owned a PC. More than half of them bought Zoomer because of software (offered as an add-on) that transferred data to and from

The modular approach has numerous advantages. If a new program (or other complex system) can be specified as N modules, N teams can work in parallel. Moreover, individual modules can subsequently be improved without touching other parts of the overall program, and they can be used in other programs.

Four key strategies helped Microsoft obtain the leading position in personal computers: (1) offering lower prices to users than its competitors; (2) intensely promoting API-based software services to developers; (3) promoting the development of peripherals, sometimes through direct subsidies, in order to increase the value of the Windows platform t

Creative destruction has been a hallmark of economic progress for millennia, but it has proceeded at a glacial pace for most of history. The Industrial Revolution sped this process up. Even so, it took decades for change to filter through the economy following innovations such as the spinning jenny, steam engine, and electric generator. The informa

It is common to bundle together products that are complements, such as automobiles and tires, but firms may find that it pays to bundle products that aren’t complements. We already saw an example of this above. Bundling persuaded two consumers to buy a product even though each wanted only a single component. This saved the manufacturer costs. The i

Over time, Palm’s metamorphosis from a complete systems provider to a supplier of only operating systems (PalmSource) has been perhaps the most striking. Many platform vendors have been partially integrated into applications, producing some themselves and, in a variety of ways discussed in this chapter, encouraging third parties to produce others.

Businesses in multisided markets often subsidize one side of the market to get the other side on board—sometimes explicitly by charging low or negative prices.