The creation of a book is a team effort to which many people contribute. A few members of our publishing team have been particularly important to all three coauthors of Platform Revolution.
We want to thank our editorial advisor, Karl Weber, for his tremendous skill in unifying the voices of three authors. Karl, your patience, wisdom, and experience have been essential.
We want to thank our agent, Carol Franco, for her wise counsel at every stage of this project. And we are grateful to our editor at W. W. Norton, Brendan Curry, and to the rest of the Norton team for their enthusiasm and belief in this book.
We would like to thank the many companies and organizations that have provided research funding and have made their employees available to us in support of our effort to better understand network business models. Geoff Parker and Marshall Van Alystne are grateful to organizations that include Accenture, AT&T, British Telecom, the California ISO, Cellular South, Cisco, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Dun & Bradstreet, France Telecom, GE, Goldman Sachs, Haier Group, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, IBM, Intel, the International Post Corporation, Law & Economics Consulting Group, Mass Mutual, Microsoft, Mindtree, Mitsubishi Bank, NetApp, PIM Interconnection, the State of New York, Pearson, Pfizer, SAP, Telecom Italia, Thomson Reuters, the U.S. Postal Service, and the U.S. Office of the Inspector General. This book is richer for the generosity of their support.
Sangeet Choudary would like to thank the various companies he has worked with in advisory positions and on commissioned research, including the Centre for Global Enterprise, the INSEAD Business School, Intuit, Yahoo, Schibsted Media, Spotify, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, 500Startups, JFDI Asia, Autodesk, Adobe, Accenture, Dun & Bradstreet, Webb Brazil, BHP Billiton, Philips, Shutterstock, SWIFT, the iSpirit foundation, and Telkom Indonesia. All these experiences have proven extremely valuable in building up Sangeet’s body of work on platforms.
In addition, each of the authors has a personal list of friends, colleagues, advisors, and supporters they wish to acknowledge.
GEOFFREY G. PARKER
I thank my wife, Debra, my father, Don, and my children, Benjamin and Elizabeth, for their wonderful support and feedback during the process of writing this book.
I thank my advisors and mentors at MIT—Arnold Barnett, Steve Connors, Richard DeNeufville, Charles Fine, Gordon Hamilton, Richard Lester, Richard Tabors, and Daniel Whitney—for their support, guidance, and enthusiasm. They truly opened up a new world to me.
At MIT, I was fortunate to meet a group of lifelong collaborators: Edward Anderson, Nitin Joglekar, and Marshall Van Alstyne. I could not ask for a finer set of colleagues and friends.
In the process of teaching and learning about platforms, I came to meet Tom Eisenmann, who has been a great friend and collaborator. His ideas have contributed significantly to this work.
I was also fortunate to meet our coauthor Sangeet Choudary, who has worked at and consulted with numerous platform firms. His experience has been wonderfully complementary to my own.
I thank Erik Brynjolfsson, Andy McAfee, Dave Verrill, and the great team at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE). The IDE has been instrumental in hosting the MIT Platform Summit and providing Marshall and me with the opportunity to work with multiple companies as part of our effort to bridge practice and academia.
Peter Evans has inspired me with his insatiable curiosity and drive to measure the growing platform economy. I have also been fortunate to be part of a large community of like-minded scholars who are interested in the economics of information systems, and I am grateful for the regular interaction.
I am grateful to my colleagues at Tulane University, who have provided a sounding board for me to test and strengthen the ideas presented in this book. I have also been fortunate to teach wonderful students at Tulane, who have eagerly helped to refine earlier versions of this material.
I wish to acknowledge the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the Louisiana Board of Regents for their generous support of my research agenda.
Finally, I again thank Marshall, who has joined me on a nearly twenty-year odyssey to try to understand the rules of the world we are living in and how to navigate its ever-changing waters. I look forward to many more years of entertainment and fascination as we continue the journey.
MARSHALL W. VAN ALSTYNE
Thank you, Erik and Alexander, for your love, support, and patience while Dad worked on this book. Thank you, Joyce, for carrying through on a project that’s finally over. Family will always matter most.
I thank my advisors at MIT: Erik Brynjolfsson, Chris Kemerer, Stuart Madnick, Thomas Malone, Wanda Orlikowski, and Lones Smith. The standards you set were remarkable. I also thank the MIT community for letting me be a part of it, for its openness, and for its joy in experimentation. There is a reason that Open CourseWare, edX, PET scans, RSA encryption, spreadsheets, and condensed soup sprang from people in this environment. It is one of the most grueling and at the same time one of the best intentioned and most rewarding places anywhere.
I join Geoff in thanking the members of the great team at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, including Dave Verrill, Erik Brynjolfsson, Andy McAfee, Glenn Urban, Tommy Buzzell, and Justin Lockenwitz. Thank you Michael Schrage for good wine and deep thoughts. You all are where great ideas gain great influence.
Our work on platforms draws heavily on that of Tom Eisenmann and Andrei Hagiu at Harvard Business School, whose teaching materials are excellent. Tom in particular taught me how much theory really does need application, and his contributions as a collaborator have led to many successful papers.
When it comes to understanding startups and social aspects of platforms, few could be better than our coauthor Sangeet Choudary, who has worked at and consulted with numerous platform firms. His experience is wonderful, and he could not be a better addition to our team.
Recently, Peter Evans has inspired us with his ability to build a community of platform scholarship and deliver new data analytic insights into the behaviors of the network economy.
At Boston University, I thank the research rebels—Erol Pekoz, Stine Grodal, and Chris Dellarocas—who meet regularly over lunch to discuss research, swap stories, and poke fun at each other’s ideas. As head of the digital learning initiative, Chris practices what we discuss here. Paul Carlile, the whole school and I owe you thanks for helping to create such a supportive and collaborative academic culture. Maria Anderson and Brett Marks, thank you for making everything work.
In teaching, I owe much to my many students, especially those in IS710, IS827, and IS912, who helped me fully cook my half-baked ideas. It’s wonderful to see so many of you start companies and take leadership roles—please keep in touch with me as your careers blossom. Sinan Aral, a remarkable MIT student turned faculty member, helped sharpen some of my key ideas on networks. Students like Tushar Shanker, now at Airbnb, are the best reason to teach.
The National Science Foundation deserves special credit for helping to launch my academic career with a CAREER Award, as well as providing numerous grants along the way via the IOC, SGER, iCORPS, and SBIR programs.
Geoff Parker, it’s hard to imagine any of this without you. You’ve been a friend, collaborator, drinking buddy, and sparring partner—contributing to my growth in all the ways that mattered. It’s been almost two decades of output, but we’re just getting started. My best work has been possible because of you. Thank you.
SANGEET PAUL CHOUDARY
First and foremost, I thank my wife, Devika, and my parents, Varu and Effie, for supporting every decision I’ve ever taken, including the decision to quit a traditional career and devote my life’s work to understanding how connected systems transform the world. Out of this curiosity emerged the focus on researching platforms.
I also thank my parents-in-law, Payal and Arun Sikka, for their enthusiasm and support at every step of this journey. I thank my friends Yow Kin Cheong, David Dayalan, L. T. Jeyachandran, and many others who have enthusiastically partnered on this journey with me.
I want to especially thank my coauthors, Geoffrey Parker and Marshall Van Alstyne, for being the best allies and partners I could ever have asked for on this journey to understanding the impact of technology and connectivity on today’s economy. It’s been a privilege to have partnered with them in further building the body of work that explains this field.
Finally, I am grateful to everyone who has followed my work on platforms on the Internet and across different research and media channels, embracing the principle of connected business models and my work on this topic as they work to transform their businesses. It is that large-scale proof of concept—multiple businesses globally applying this work and achieving important results—that drives me daily to build our understanding of this field further.