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Lessons from the PayPal developer conference

PayPal's developer conference in early November, the company's first such event, gave some good lessons for tech companies that want to create their own developer communities. Since that seems to include most tech firms these days, we thought it might...

Tags: platforms

Software platforms as a business tool: How we got here, and where we're going

Intuit and Stanford recently asked me to give talks on computer platforms and what makes them successful. (By platforms I mean software with APIs that third party developers can write apps on top of; Windows and Macintosh are both platforms,...

Tags: history , OS , platforms , software

Lessons from Amazon Kindle for other tech companies

One of the toughest tasks in the technology industry is jump-starting sales of a platform -- a product that requires a lot of third-party content or software. A PC without applications is a doorstop; an iPod without music is just...

Tags: amazon , e-books , kindle , platforms , strategy