The Economist gives a brief overview of the platformisation that is pitting the large players in the IT industry against one another. The real battle raging between Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, Mozilla and others is about just that: each want to be a dominant platform player, each with its own take on the game. There are several fronts in these epic battles, but ultimately it comes down to raking up as much mindshare as possible, hence the purse holder’s attention and interest. Microsoft and Google might be the only ones attempting to fight it on all fronts, it seems to me for example that Apple isn’t really going after Facebook (might have given up), and Facebook’s platform could be seen as both a PaaS and a SaaS play, they may not want or need to go for enterprise data centre market. Linux is also in the same game, though it’s interesting to see that actually Amazon and Google (soon Samsung and Intel via Tizen?) might indirectly doing Linux a favour. I can’t truly read Mozilla yet, Google being their largest source of revenue makes me inclined to think they root for Google in a kind of kinship manner.
I always find it amusing to read some pundits ripping apart one particular vendor, say Apple or Microsoft, and citing Google as a better role model for openness. Linux is the only player that is truly flying the liberal flag, though Linux is more of a movement and isn’t a single vendor in any way. Every vendor is vying for dominance, taking sides is just as much fanboyism as any. Nobody knows for sure where this will all lead us, but I think the consumer wins when there is choice. It’s always going to be daunting to switchover from one platform to another
Here’s The Economist article: Platforms: Something to stand on.