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Comment by jonbarker | Hacker News Reader

Please humor me this reductio ad absurdam question: So does that make a toothbrush company a platform? Because arguably lots of people are avoiding cavities, and that fact seems more economically valuable than the total dollar value of all the toothbrushes sold, or the net present value of all the toothbrush customers in the world. What am I missing here? (I don't think a toothbrush company is a platform company, for the record).

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That the only thing "building" on top of the toothbrush is tooth paste. Everything else being done to avoid cavities does not depend on toothbrushes.

So it would be a platform if you had a dominant company whose brushes would require certain kinds of pastes. Since most toothbrushes are completely interchangable as are pastes created by those same companies, there's nobody really building their business on top of any of those particular "platforms".

I think in this context it's about businesses built on top of the platform and their direct revenue. A person brushing teeth is not building a business and generating revenue.

Well it gets defined in the article as 'economic value' not necessarily building businesses using the platform company's features.

There's an additional key point that missing a single tooth-brushing does not cause cavities. If it did and:

- you knew when a person was out of toothpaste and going to the store to buy it

- you could implement differential for customers, singling out the customer(s) who have run out of toothpaste

- you could control pricing for all stores at which customers could buy toothpaste

Then yes, you could extract the full value of your toothbrush product.

Whether this makes it a platform would remain up for debate. I'd just call it a toothpaste monopoly.

> What am I missing here?

You're mistaken about what Gates meant by "economic value".

The quote is "A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it." While toothbrush users may derive some sort of personal "economic value" in a very abstract sense, I think it's clear that the quote is about the sort of economic value that is defined by earnings.

You're generally not creating value when you brush your teeth, at least not in any significant sense, and not in the same way as putting Windows on a bunch of office computers and doing work on them. No one is buying a bunch of toothbrushes and handing them to their employees as a productivity multiplier.

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