Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy―and How to Make Them Work for You

by Geoffrey G. Parker

Second, a platform ecosystem can evolve faster when the core platform is a clean, simple system rather than a tangle of numerous features. For this reason, C. Y. Baldwin and K. B. Clark of Harvard Business School describe a well-designed platform as consisting of a stable core layer that restricts variety, sitting underneath an evolving layer that enables variety.12 Today’s best-designed platforms incorporate this structural principle. For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the most successful platform for providing cloud-based information storage and management, focuses on optimizing a handful of basic operations, including data storage, computation, and messaging.13 Other services, which are used by just a fraction of AWS customers, are restricted to the periphery of the platform and provided through purpose-built apps.