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

Guest Blog by Joel KO Hyun Sik Co Founder and CEO at Marvelstone Ventures | Founding Partner at LATTICE80

This is review of the ideas in the new book How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--and How to Make Them Work for You by Geoffrey G. Parker, Marshall W. Van Alstyne, and Sangeet Paul Choudary.
The platform model underlies the success of many of today's biggest, fastest-growing, and most powerfully disruptive companies, from Google, Amazon, and Microsoft to Uber, Airbnb, and eBay.
The platform is a simple-sounding yet transformative concept that is radically changing business, the economy, and society at large.
In fact, the big difference between Apple and Samsung as smartphone manufacturers reside in whether they are regarded as a platform or not. As you know, one is (Apple) but the other is not (Samsung).

This book is trying to solve a number of puzzles, as highlighted below:

• How have platform businesses such as Uber and Airbnb managed to disrupt and dominate vast traditional industries within just a few years of their own launch?
• How can platform businesses out-compete traditional companies while employing just a tiny fraction of the number of people the incumbents employ?
• How has the rise of the platform transformed the principles governing economic growth and business competition?
• How and why have specific companies and business leaders soared to the heights of success, plummeted to the depths of failure - or both - as a result of their use, or misuse, of platform business methods?

AI and platform model
Since my focus has been at Artificial Intelligence, while reading this book, I could get some tips on how AI will evolve (though this book is not about AI). One of my recent observations is that every tech giant is racing towards a specific goal in the area of AI. It is now about becoming the platform for AI. Current major players in the AI race are all partaking in this platform war. They treat AI as a kind of platform that is helping them and their users manage this new era of technology, rather than as an additional service or module.
The book offers a holistic and in-depth framework to understand and foresee how AI is moving forward and influencing our industry and daily life. I would recommend companies in the space apply the lessons here to their own development of AI.