My first Inc. Magazine guest post is live on the benefits of building platforms. Here’s an excerpt:

These days, you can’t go five minutes without hearing someone talk about platforms. The term is almost a buzzword. As I explain in The Age of the Platform: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Have Redefined Business, a platform is merely a structure made up of “planks,” or integrated features. For instance, Google in 1998 wasn’t a platform; it was a really neat search engine. By adding planks such as Gmail, Maps, Docs, Voice, YouTube, and countless others, it became a true platform.

Click here to read the whole thing.