Platform Revolution by Geoffrey Parker, Marshall Van Alstyne, and Sangeet Choudary is a comprehensive look at the emergence of platforms as market dominators, their competition against pipeline businesses, and best practices in founding and managing platforms.

Platforms connect two types of users in order to exchange something of value. This is different from the traditional pipeline model of business where something of value is created by transferring it from producer to producer with the consumer receiving it at the last step. Platforms are dominating production processes particularly because they reduce the costs of value creation, consumption, and quality control. Platforms serve consumer-facing markets as well as business-to-business markets and can power rapid growth through economies of scale.

Each side of the network depends on the other side to be in place in order to function, so a central challenge of any platform is to recruit users on both sides.

Please note: This is key takeaways and analysis of the book and not the original book.