October 2018
Beginner to intermediate
224 pages
4h 29m
English
Content preview from Chasing Digital
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CHAPTER 5Platforms
Commerce changes the fate and genius of nations.
Thomas Gray
The tectonic plates of big business have shifted. Now, the most successful companies in the world have a digital platform at their core. Facebook, Alibaba, Google, Amazon — they all have one, and so should you.
Platforms provide value for all users as they are able to share resources. The economic value, however, comes to those who own the platform and facilitate exchanges that would not otherwise occur. The more transactions you expedite, the more money you generate. Being the platform provider also minimises your exposure to risk, which is dispersed among all the platform’s contributors and users. And the beauty of enabling all these interactions and innovations is data. Platforms naturally attract data. Data drives informed decision making, providing the platform owner with insights into future trends, opportunities and of course new cash streams. If you think that sounds like a flywheel, you’d be right.
Breaking these concepts down into first principles, we can see how a platform generates value through facilitating transactions. A shopping centre is a pre-digital platform (see figure 5.1); it has suppliers (the shops) and it has buyers. The platform owner provides infrastructure such as cleaning, power, toilets, parking and so on, which not only complements the transactions, but actually facilitates said transactions by improving the shopping experience. Thanks to the infrastructure and amenities ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.