Platforms
An annotated collection of 4 books, papers & essays on platforms, spanning 2005 to 2025. Featuring works by Tim O'Reilly, Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson and 1 more — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.
What Is Web 2.0
O'Reilly's 2005 essay crystallized a set of patterns that were already emerging — network effects, data as competitive advantage, software as service, users as co-developers — and gave them a name that defined an era of…
Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
Three simultaneous rebalancings: from the human mind to the machine, from the product to the platform, and from the core (the organisation) to the crowd (external networks). Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that firms have…
The Consumer Welfare Effects of Online Ads: Evidence from a 9-Year Experiment
Brynjolfsson and his Microsoft Research collaborators ran a nine-year experiment measuring how online advertising affects consumer welfare — not just click-through rates or conversion metrics, but actual economic value t…
Measuring Social Media Network Effects
The first rigorous empirical measurement of what social media platforms are actually worth to users — $78-101 per month per person — with the crucial insight that 20-34% of that value comes from network effects rather th…