Digital platforms and ecosystems

Hello and welcome to the lecture on digital platforms and ecosystems. I am Dr. Hakan Ozalp, an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Business School. I study platforms and platform-based ecosystems. In this lecture, I will give the basics of what a platform is and what are the important things we should think about in competition between and within platforms. I will also provide a mini case study during this lecture.

Not so long ago, we used to actually own products. I think the easiest representation of this are the DVDs and Blu-rays we used to have to watch movies at our home. This has abruptly changed in the last few years when the streaming platform Netflix and its competitors have entered. Now, buying a DVD or Blu-ray is something mostly for collectors, but otherwise people think it's just a burden. We see this not only in streaming platforms, but we see these changes basically in multitudes of industries. Again, another good example can be the feature phones. The phones like Nokia produced 15 years ago. During these days, like 2005, 2006, you may think hey, Nokia is such a big company. You can't really challenge them in the mobile phone business. Of course, iPhone and the other smartphones like iPhone, like those produced, for example, by Samsung, come into play and they completely destroyed Nokia within just a few years. Most of this has been attributed to the fact that the App Store structure in the smartphone was much more useful and advanced compared to many phones that Nokia had. Users actually happily jumped away from feature phones to smartphones. I think this is the easiest representation of the power of platforms over product, like feature phones and how they actually replaced them in many different industries.