🏆 What is the ultimate platform success?
Cliff Brake December 09, 2025 #platform #product #business #strategy #infrastructure #growth
The ultimate platform success is when an internal platform turns into a sellable product/service, or an open source project.
Perhaps some companies succeed by starting out building a platform as a product, but the greatest platform successes started as internal platforms:
- AWS
- Kafka
- Kubernetes
- Slack
- Shopify
Why does this work? Perhaps because developers building internal platforms have the "platform mindset." Starting out building a platform to sell means building with the "product" mindset instead of the "platform" mindset.
Compare AWS, Azure, and GCP. Amazon and Microsoft use these platforms extensively internally. Google does not. Google likely has valid reasons for this as GCP is not their primary product (compared to search, YouTube, etc.). But the results speak for themselves:
| Feature | AWS (Amazon) | Microsoft Azure | Google Cloud (GCP) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Market Share | ~29-31% | ~20% | ~13% |
| Revenue Run Rate | ~$132 Billion | ~$123 Billion | ~$61 Billion |
| Primary Internal Use | High. Amazon.com is heavily migrated to AWS, including retail databases and Prime Video. | High. LinkedIn, Office 365, and GitHub are actively migrating or fully migrated to Azure. | Mixed. Core search/ads/YouTube/Gmail/Docs runs on internal-only PROD infrastructure. |