JP Rangaswami’s post on platforms is worth reading. Rather than try to summarize it myself, I’ll just excerpt a few highlights:
His definition of platforms:
- something that is a foundation, an enabling environment, upon which others can build things, make things
- something that exists for a specific purpose (or set of purposes), and which invests in capabilities related to those purposes
- something that then makes it easy for people to use those capabilities
- something that does all this in a commercial model that facilitates the creation and development of new products, new services, new markets, new marketplaces
- something that can coexist with other platforms and ecosystems
And a bit more about platform API’s:
Anything that aspires to be a platform needs to engender this trust. So when you look at “platform APIs†don’t be surprised at what they do at their core. They’re usually about a very small number of things:
- user directories, adding and removing people, grouping and classification
- identity, authentication and permissioning
- service and data inventorying, cataloguing and access
- publishing of things digital
- distribution of things digital
This is a great piece and much of it centers on the notion of trust – users trusting the platform and platforms trusting other platforms. That’s critical for the kinds of service interoperability that is required for an open cloud computing to succeed.