MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Beyond a ‘Winner-Takes-All' Strategy for Platforms

Recent battles for platform market share have shown that some technology platforms are better than others. More specifically, some platforms seem both more durable and more lucrative than others due to important characteristics of the platform and its users. Social media and online auction platforms demonstrate the “winner-takes-all” narrative, with one dominant platform — and its sponsoring company — capturing the majority of users from the competition. However, in other platform-mediated markets, many competing platforms seem to persist.

In other cases, platforms like Amazon have risen to dominance in their markets because of conventional scale and scope advantages, not because they relied on direct user interactions. These cases suggest that successful platform strategy is not just about the size or structure of the platform, but also the specific nature of interactions among users.