Invisible Engines: How Software Platforms Drive Innovation and Transform Industries

The bundling or the nature of the bundle isn’t a conscious choice. It emerges from the physical (distribution) format of the offering. Still it isn’t apparent to many providers of physical offerings that there are elements of daycare, social or calendaring / commitment integrated with the core offering.

By the mid-1960s, a trend that would become increasingly pronounced was already apparent: while the expense of building a computer’s hardware was steadily declining, the cost of creating both user and system software was rising. In an extremely bold stroke, IBM took advantage of the trend. They announced, in the mid-sixties, all at one time, an ent

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In the Web2 world, market infrastructure and market governance were bundled by platforms. Amazon, Ebay, Upwork, Uber, and other such marketplaces bundle both market infrastructure (in the case of Amazon, even physical infrastructure through FBA and Amazon Logistics) and market governance.

When the distribution technology changed with the internet, there was going to be the great unwind, and then the great rebundle, in the form of Google and Facebook and Twitter and all these new bundles. I think music is a great example of that. It made sense in the LP and CD era to put eight or 10 or 12 or 15 songs on a disc and press the disc and ... See more