Platform Leadership: How Intel, Microsoft, and Cisco Drive Industry Innovation

Based on lessons from successful high-technology platform leaders, this book explains the dynamics of these highly complex and interconnected processes and partnerships. It provides a study of how companies successfully become platform leaders - companies whose products provide the basic technological architecture on which other products and systems are built (such as the microprocessor and Windows Operating System). The authors discuss how platform producers encourage other firms to create complimentary innovations, orchestrate innovations and standards for an entire industry and deal with various internal and external tensions or conflicts that arise when implementing platform-leadership strategies.