IDG Contributor Network: Do you really want to be a platform?

Platforms are the newest cool thing— arguably the holy grail of digital strategy, if you read the headlines. Increasingly, many of the biggest businesses are software companies with platform business models. In a platform business, creators and suppliers add content and services to the platform, consumers flock to the platform to use those services and content, and the platforms exist in the middle, with the businesses behind them taking a cut. Many of the platforms seem to grow, as the sa