Pipelines, Platforms, and the New Rules of Strategy

Scale now trumps differentiation. by Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker and Sangeet Paul Choudary

From the Magazine (April 2016)

Artwork: Vin Rathod, Aura (series), 2012–2014, photograph

Summary.

Back in 2007 the five major mobile-phone manufacturers—Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and LG—collectively controlled 90% of the industry’s global profits. That year, Apple’s iPhone burst onto the scene and began gobbling up market share.

Read more on Strategy or related topic Competitive strategy

A version of this article appeared in the April 2016 issue of Harvard Business Review.

Marshall W. Van Alstyne is the Allen & Kelli Questrom Professor of Information Systems at Boston University.

@InfoEcon

Geoffrey G. Parker (gparker@dartmouth.edu) is a professor of engineering at Dartmouth College and a research fellow at MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. He coauthored Platform Revolution (W.W. Norton & Company, 2016), the April 2016 HBR article “Pipelines, Platforms, and the New Rules of Strategy,” and the October 2006 HBR article “Strategies for Two-Sided Markets,” an HBR all-time top 50.

@g2parker

Sangeet Paul Choudary is a C-level advisor to executives globally on platform business models and an entrepreneur-in-residence at INSEAD. He has been ranked among the top 30 emerging business thinkers globally by Thinkers50 and selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He is a co-author of Platform Revolution (W.W. Norton & Company, 2016) and the April 2016 HBR article “Pipelines, Platforms, and the New Rules of Strategy.” Follow him on Twitter at @sanguit.

Read more on Strategy or related topic Competitive strategy

Pipelines, Platforms, and the New Rules of Strategy

Summary.

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