Service Platform Development: Comparison of Two E-Services Platforms

Platform concepts have been around for about a decade now. While their focus was on the manufacturing industry in the beginnings, interest has shifted to services – and Internet-based services in particular. This paper provides an overview of popular product platform concepts, a new view upon services in the light of the Internet, and links platforms to Internet-based services. Two companies with a tremendous platform potential, Google and EBay, are introduced and analyzed with respect to their usage of the product platform concept. After a brief discussion of the results, two product offerings of both Google and EBay are compared to give a practical example.