Platform Conflicts

.......Competition between platforms generates vendor behavior that sometimes aligns with the interests of users and application developers, and sometimes does not. For example, competition gives platform leaders incentives to improve the functionality of their code and improve the experiences of their users. It also leads them to make it difficult for users and programmers to switch between platforms. What else drives the incentives of participants within platforms? This column focuses on the interplay between platform leaders and other participants. Successful platforms create value, but success creates the seeds of conflicts. Those conflicts concern to whom the value flows. That is worthwhile to understand. These conflicts generate a variety of incentives, and related behavior arises in many contexts. It is a part of the landscape for most firms.