I don't know when I gleaned it but it was definitely a culmination of my time at Microsoft, that building a platform is one of those painfully obvious things th

I don't know when I gleaned it but it was definitely a culmination of my time at Microsoft, that building a platform is one of those painfully obvious things that everyone should be doing. I wrote a rant about it in 2010[1] thinking I was just putting out the obvious for lay persons. WordPress has some really horrible backward compatibility baggage but the largest reason for it's success is that it's a platform. Being a platform is as simple as having an API to let others build on top. The platform API is like a bag of seeds that lets everyone do their own gardening using your seeds. This builds an ecosystem. Accessibility when it comes to Platform APIs is also best illustrated with a simple example and should be clearly obvious to anyone who used jQuery, Prototype and the ilk. At the time jQuery offered method chaining and which other JS frameworks did not. And it also offered some really simple and well-named convenience methods. $('#foo').append('OK!').show(); ...returning 'this' in functions to allow method chaining was a light bulb moment for me after I saw how well jQuery did it. The jQuery plugin ecosystem stands on its own merit. The great thing about building a developer platform is that it leads to an ecosystem of apps and plugins. And the great thing about an ecosystem is that it gets you venerable developer talent on a truly global scale. I recall having a discussing many years back about why Microsoft enterprise licenses were mostly available only through certified partners. It struck me at the time that Microsoft was handing out 15%+ commissions for no reason while it could have adopted Apple's direct selling model. It turns out Microsoft had essentially build a retail platform where being a Gold partner unlocked top margins. You could find Microsoft certified partners everywhere. And this built an ecosystem. These certified partners were cross-selling and up-selling Microsoft products to no end, layering their own support on top and pushing for 3-year release cycles so the stream of money would get renewed vigour. [1]: http://aleembawany.com/2010/08/23/platforms-strategy/ http://aleembawany.com/2010/08/23/platforms-strategy/