Perhaps the earliest example of this platform model was Google. Its search prowess allowed it to scale quickly, and once the company hit critical mass, the AdWords platform enabled self-provisioning advertising platforms from which other companies could grow. Google in turn took its share by taxing that growth. Facebook was also successful at becoming a platform, relying on its extraordinary market penetration and knowledge about its users to spawn such ExOs as Zynga and its recent mobile efforts. Amazon is another success story, as is Apple’s App Store ecosystem, which is probably the
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