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> Gates said something along the lines of, “That’s a crock of shit. This isn’t a platform. A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exce

> Gates said something along the lines of, “That’s a crock of shit. This isn’t a platform. A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.” Funny how the largest tech companies and many silicon valley startups of this wave are trying to do the opposite.

matchagaucho 8y ago
For an Ad-driven revenue company to become a "platform", they must remove themselves from the actual media content and pay royalties to content producers. Neither Facebook or Google are able to do this wholly, because their user adoption is based on content curation and personalized delivery of repurposed content (page rank, graph rank, feed).
- empath75 8y ago
  Google is a content aggregator and an ad platform, and a lot of people have made a lot of money advertising on google.
  - matchagaucho 8y ago
    The point of the article is that the money made by others must exceed the platform. SEO experts and Doubleclick partners make money only at the whim of Google's policies. Google can make or break a partner's revenue stream with just one change.
    - adventured 8y ago
      > The point of the article is that the money made by others must exceed the platform. I'd posit that the economic value derived from Google's ad network, exceeds its own revenue from the ads by several fold at a minimum. The majority of the ad network value is going to the businesses that are doing the advertising. Companies overall have used Google's advertising systems to such a massive degree, because the advertising measurably generates a greater sales/business return than the money they put into the ads. Google's ad network (which yes they ripped off from GoTo.com) was the first large scale advertising system in history to offer such an easy way to judge return on advertising spend. Previously neither radio, TV nor newspapers could offer the kind of instant information that Google ads could on performance (and often they didn't offer any accurate information at all, by which to judge advertising results). Businesses have been voraciously using it for all these years, because it has worked extremely well.
CodeCharm 8y ago
This makes me think there's more depth to the current Microsoft mission statement than appears at first blush. I've seen many people shrug away that mission statement as a toothless platitude or else they are merely blasé about it. [disclosure: #MsftAdvocate]
jandrese 8y ago
Doesn't that make it basically impossible for Apple, Microsoft, or Google to make a "platform", because what platform is going to exceed a trillion dollars or whatever they are worth this week?

matchagaucho 8y ago

For an Ad-driven revenue company to become a "platform", they must remove themselves from the actual media content and pay royalties to content producers. Neither Facebook or Google are able to do this wholly, because their user adoption is based on content curation and personalized delivery of repurposed content (page rank, graph rank, feed).

empath75 8y ago
Google is a content aggregator and an ad platform, and a lot of people have made a lot of money advertising on google.
- matchagaucho 8y ago
  The point of the article is that the money made by others must exceed the platform. SEO experts and Doubleclick partners make money only at the whim of Google's policies. Google can make or break a partner's revenue stream with just one change.
  - adventured 8y ago
    > The point of the article is that the money made by others must exceed the platform. I'd posit that the economic value derived from Google's ad network, exceeds its own revenue from the ads by several fold at a minimum. The majority of the ad network value is going to the businesses that are doing the advertising. Companies overall have used Google's advertising systems to such a massive degree, because the advertising measurably generates a greater sales/business return than the money they put into the ads. Google's ad network (which yes they ripped off from GoTo.com) was the first large scale advertising system in history to offer such an easy way to judge return on advertising spend. Previously neither radio, TV nor newspapers could offer the kind of instant information that Google ads could on performance (and often they didn't offer any accurate information at all, by which to judge advertising results). Businesses have been voraciously using it for all these years, because it has worked extremely well.

CodeCharm 8y ago

This makes me think there's more depth to the current Microsoft mission statement than appears at first blush. I've seen many people shrug away that mission statement as a toothless platitude or else they are merely blasé about it. [disclosure: #MsftAdvocate]

jandrese 8y ago

Doesn't that make it basically impossible for Apple, Microsoft, or Google to make a "platform", because what platform is going to exceed a trillion dollars or whatever they are worth this week?