What do Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google have in common? Many things. Here’s a big one: they are all customer-centric.

Amazon and Apple personify this as well as any company out there now. It’s all about the user and customer experience. Everything else is secondary.

The trouble with being primarily product-centric is two-fold. First, it often forces you to put a square peg in a round hole. Second, you don’t listen as well to your customers.

Case in point: Up until recently, Microsoft tried to dismiss what many of its customers wanted (read: cloud computing, on-demand solutions, less hardware and IT support). Why? Microsoft didn’t really offer them. Sure, Microsoft now has upped its cloud offerings, but the company was truly a laggard in cloud computing.

In the Age of the Platform, products still matter, but customers and users matter more.