Invisible Engines: How Software Platforms Drive Innovation and Transform Industries

Getting the balance right seems to be more important than building shares. Platform markets do not tip quickly because as a practical matter, it takes time to get things right. And the first entrant often does not win in the end: many other firms may come in and successfully tweak the pricing structure, product design, or business model.

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.

The console video gaming industry operates a radically different business model from other software platform industries. Game manufacturers tightly integrate hardware and software systems; they offer consoles to consumers at less than manufacturing cost, and they earn profits by developing games and charging third-party game developers for access t

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

It is easy to see why application developers find the ability to access system services through APIs appealing. Rather than every application developer writing hundreds of lines of code to allocate memory to an object, to take the example above, the operating system developer writes 116 lines of code and makes the system services this code provides

Bundling can be used in a different way to facilitate price discrimination, which we discussed in the preceding chapter.14 That is, if different groups of consumers place different values on groups of components, bundles can be designed so that those with stronger demand pay more. The idea is possible to design bundles of components that cause cons

Bundling decisions by multisided platforms, such as software platforms, are more complex since they must take into account the effect on all customer groups. Multisided businesses must consider both the additional customers they get on one side as a result of including a new feature and the additional customers they will get on the other side from

Like all multisided platforms, the pricing structures of the software platforms we have encountered in this book reflect the need to get all unintegrated sides on board: end users, application/game/content developers, and manufacturers of hardware and peripheral equipment. The structures we have examined have three remarkable features. First, all o

A fundamental decision facing all multisided platform businesses is choice of a price structure: How much should the platform vendor charge each side relative to the others? Since transactions involving some sides may have significant associated variable costs (the production and distribution costs of video game consoles, for instance), the most il