I think a platform discussion is a reasonable place to start looking at the overall value of Microsoft.  I have to start by saying I really don’t like the term “platform”, it’s used to describe all manner of software systems and hence means different things to different people.  Unfortunately I like the term “stack” even less which is the only alternative I can come up with.  So I’m going to persevere with the former and define what I mean – when I say “The Microsoft Platform” (I’ll just call it “The Platform” for short).

Let’s reminisce for a moment.  At least since the inception of Office and BackOffice, Redmonites have been thinking about software from an engineering standpoint beyond individual products, and therefore creating value beyond individual products.  Things were relatively simple at this time, we wrote some software which appealed to a broad audience and made it simple and attractive for other companies to build functionality alongside and on-top of our products.  This collection of software provided a common foundation (going beyond just an OS) and was an enabler for others to create more customised solutions using custom code while leveraging the generic pieces.  (Hmm, this sounds like Linux :-))  This is pretty fundamental stuff for the techos , but value is about business – I think it’s time we shared.

No one can deny that this approach was spectacularly successful.  The core of what Microsoft produced was a set of integrated software components, which spanned multiple products, and could be used and re-used by the solutions created using them.  Collectively these components are what I (and many others) refer to as the “The Platform”.  Somewhat confusing given Microsoft often refers to the “Windows Platform”, or the “Office Platform”, etc – I think of these as merely subsets of “The Platform”.  (It would be useful step forward if, as a company, we recognised the importance of this holistic usage of the term “Platform” and stoped using it in to describe subsets of “The Platform”.)

As I’ve described it, the “The Platform” refers collectively to all of our software components in all of our products – that’s a fair chunk of what we do as an organisation.  So I would argue that “The Platform” is a key part of the overall value of Microsoft and worthy of more discussion and examination…