Make Your Platform a Product

Context

What do you think about when you think of household technology companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon?

Microsoft has their operating system
Google has their search engine
Amazon has their marketplace.

But what do all of these companies have in common? Each of these companies provide their platform as a service.

Microsoft offers Azure
Google offers GCP
Amazon offers AWS

Application developers need infrastructure to build and ship their products, and these three companies are providing it. Companies acquire a dependency on these cloud services to run their applications. The result is win-win. Companies can use these cloud services to seamlessly scale up, and the cloud providers make more money when they do.

Bezo's Mandate

In Steve Yegge's rant on platforms, Yegge wrote how in 2002, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos famously issued a mandate that said something along the lines of:

All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.
There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct

linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.
It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom

protocols—doesn't matter.
All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up

to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.
Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.
Thank you; have a nice day!

Bezo's mandate birthed what has become AWS, a leading cloud provider that serves many big-name companies. According to how Amazon makes money, AWS alone brings in about 50% of Amazon's operating income.

Operating income is the profit realized from a business's operations after deducting operating expenses such as wages, depreciation, and cost of goods sold (COGS). - Investopedia

The result of Amazon following through with Bezo's mandate undoubtedly turned out to be fruitful for Amazon's business as well as all of the companies that utilize its services.