Platform Revolution by Sangeet Paul Choudary

Author:Sangeet Paul Choudary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2016-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

PRINCIPLES OF SMART SELF-GOVERNANCE

FOR PLATFORMS

Kings and conquerors like to make the rules; they don’t always like to abide by them. Yet results improve when smart rules of governance are applied to platform companies themselves as well as to platform partners and participants.

The first big principle of smart self-governance for platforms is internal transparency. In platform companies, as in virtually all organizations, there’s a tendency for divisions or departments to become “siloed”—to develop unique perspectives, languages, systems, processes, and tools that are difficult for outsiders to understand, even those in another department of the same company. This makes it extremely hard to solve complex, large-scale problems that span two or more divisions, since it means that members of different work teams lack a shared vocabulary and tool set. It also makes it much harder for outsiders—including platform users and developers—to work effectively with the platform management team.

To avoid this kind of dysfunction, platform managers should strive to give all their business divisions a clear view across the entire platform. Such transparency promotes consistency, helps others develop and use key resources, and facilitates growth to scale.

The so-called Yegge Rant, executive Steve Yegge’s attempt to summarize a mandate issued by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, captures the spirit of this principle very effectively. Bezos insisted that all members of the Amazon team must learn to communicate with one another using “service interfaces”—data communication tools specifically designed to be clear, understandable, and useful to everyone in the organization as well as to outside users and partners. The idea is to treat everyone you do business with—including your colleagues in other departments and divisions of the organization—as customers with legitimate and important information needs that you are responsible to meet. Hence the seven rules presented in the Yegge Rant:

1. All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

2. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

3. There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

4. It doesn’t matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols—doesn’t matter. Bezos doesn’t care.

5. All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

6. Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired.

7. Thank you; have a nice day!

Astute application of this principle of transparency underlies the success of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the platform’s giant cloud services company. Andrew Jassy, Amazon’s vice president of technology, had observed how different divisions of Amazon kept having to develop web service operations to store, search, and communicate data.48 Jassy urged that these varied projects should be combined into a single operation with one clear, flexible, and universally comprehensible set of protocols. Doing this would make all of Amazon’s vast body of data accessible and useful to everyone in the organization.

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