Over the last two decades, the business landscape has changed radically. We can prove it easily with two lists:
2003: Microsoft, General Electric, ExxonMobil, Walmart, Pfizer, Citigroup, Johnson & Johnson, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, IBM
2023: Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, Tesla, Berkshire Hathaway, Eli Lily, TSMC
These are the 10 companies with the highest market capitalisation in 2003 and 20231. We can get three main insights by comparing the lists: only one company remained in the Top 10 two decades later (Microsoft), and the industries had shifted quite clearly from product and energy companies to tech companies. Finally, of course, five out of the 10 companies in 2023 are “platform companies”.
The Big Tech MAGMA (Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet-Google, Meta, and Amazon) established their leadership by applying platform models and became, along with “younger giants” like Airbnb and Uber, flagship cases of the platform revolution. But what are platforms? Can we really compare these companies under the same label? And, more interestingly, is it all a matter of digital native companies? How can established – non-digital-native – companies exploit platform thinking and leverage the learning from (younger) digital companies?
WHAT IS A PLATFORM?
The question “what is a platform?” is not an easy one to answer. We recently wrote a book, , which dedicates entire chapters to the peculiarities of the various typologies of platforms. Let’s start by defining what a platform is not. Not every value-creation mechanism based on a is a platform. Porter described the linear value chain as
