Comment by mehblahwhatevs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mehblahwhatevs | Hacker News Reader

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> "I remember when we raised money from Bill Gates...and Gates said something along the lines of, 'That’s a crock of shit. This isn’t a platform. A platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it, exceeds the value of the company that creates it. Then it’s a platform.'"

Interesting. But Facebook's platform != Facebook, so I don't understand the maxim that "the value of everybody that uses the platform must exceed the value of the company that created it" in order for it to be true.

You could say Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store are platforms, they even offer services (api/web-services, libs, frameworks, etc.) and devs build on-top and make living off it. But that ISN'T the company. Google has search, cars, ads, etc. Apple has it's own crap going.

Furthermore, Apple is worth 1 trillion dollars. Must the value of the platform as determined by "everybody that uses it" exceed 1 trillion? Or must it exceed the yearly revenue of Apple instead?

I believe this use of the word "platform" in this context is a much more specific meaning where it's a counterpoint to the idea of an "aggregator." It comes up in discussions about modern large tech companies being "aggregators" or "platforms," and this is the point (allegedly) Gates is making here, that Facebook is much more an aggregator of content that users bring into the walled garden than they are an economic platform for other businesses, which is what Microsoft was/is.

If you believe that all this advertising spending and social media marketing activity actually adds more to companies on Facebook than it does to Facebook itself, then you sort of could call Facebook a platform per this definition. An advertising platform.

Right they are a multinational advertising corporation that tricks people into believing that Facebook.com = Facebook. It’s still a crock of shit however you want to slice it up.

right, Gates misspoke or it was misreported. It should be something like - the economic value that everybody derives from using it exceeds the value the company derives from their use of it.

At the time though I believe all of Facebook's economic value came from Facebook, so that the was the worth of the company.

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