vs. BigCommerce
Shopify
Platform network effect
- What it did
- More merchants draw more apps, themes and agencies, which draw more merchants
- BigCommerce
- Conceded small business to Shopify in 2015 and moved upmarket
Platform network effects
What are Platform network effects?
Users attract developers and complement producers; their contributions attract users.
How Platform network effects work
Track the incremental users attracted by complements and the incremental developer investment attracted by users. Count portable complements on both sides of the competitive comparison.
How companies won with Platform network effects
From the win chains in Strategy Canon case studies: what the winner did, and what its rival did at the same step.
vs. OneLogin · 2016–26
Okta
Integration network vendors build to, locked by switching costs
- What it did
- Vendors certify their own integrations: a self-service portal was in use by 2020, and some large buyers require an Okta integration before they buy. The network grew from 5,000+ (2016) to 8,000+ (2026). Customers run 89 apps each (2022) and 101 (2025), and gross retention held in the mid-90s after the 2023 breach
- OneLogin
- OneLogin had the larger catalog in 2011 (1,700 apps), but by 2026 it states only 'thousands'. No vendor-submission program was found. Its accounts were sticky too (under 5% churn after 2017), but the base stopped at about 5,500 customers and was folded into One Identity's suite (2021)
vs. Oracle Data Cloud · 2014–26
LiveRamp
Hundreds of integrations make one match reusable everywhere
- What it did
- Epsilon and others relied on LiveRamp in place of their own cookie infrastructure (2014)
- Oracle Data Cloud
- OnRamp claimed 'up to 95% deliverability' into top destinations, but Facebook cut Datalogix segments from its platform (2018) and GDPR cost BlueKai about 85% of European revenue
vs. Apple · 1990–99
Microsoft
Developers write for the biggest base first
- What it did
- Microsoft supplied APIs and development tools and kept old APIs working across releases
- Apple
- Consumer demand for Macs suffered from a 'relative dearth of applications' (court, 1999)
Also tagged: HashiCorp
The question to ask of a company
Do additional complements bring users, and do additional users attract valuable complements? Can those complements serve rival platforms too?
Who names it
| Author | What they call it / where it appears |
|---|---|
| Neumann | A Taxonomy of Moats — Platform ecosystem |
Note. The diagnostic and scenario are Strategy Canon’s analytical application. Test the firm’s benefit and exclusion mechanism separately; this category alone does not establish Power.