Platform Scale : For A Post-Pandemic World

The decade leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic witnessed the rise of platform business models as they drove stock market gains and extended their influence across economic and political activity. The pandemic has accelerated these platforms further. Apple, Google, Alibaba and Amazon have made strong inroads into the health-care industry. When most supply chains were reeling under the effects of the pandemic, Amazon continued unabated and even took on governmental functions. The market dominance of Apple and Google was perhaps most starkly observable in their ability to create a global contact tracing infrastructure. And even as the US-China trade war heats up, Alibaba's Electronic World Trade Platform continues to work with countries across Africa, Europe and Asia to create a new infrastructure for global trade. Platform Scale: For a Post-Pandemic World explains the inner workings of platform business models and their ability to scale rapidly. The ideas in this updated edition illustrate the importance of platform business models, the forces that power their rapid scale and the factors that will cement their dominance in a post-pandemic world. The book serves as a maker's manual, helping executives design and build platforms, and provides a lens to analyse the shifts currently underway and their implications for future platform-scale businesses