The attack plan is simple: if you build it, they will come. Let's say I wanted to build a local business service. I could do all of the searching myself, or I

The attack plan is simple: if you build it, they will come. Let's say I wanted to build a local business service. I could do all of the searching myself, or I could pay some money to google to leverage their platform. There is instant recognition of the google service, and it helps those startups decouple the difficulties of information acquisition from the business model. In general, google, facebook, apple all do the same thing: maintain a platform upon which others build stuff.