The Future of Platforms

The world’s most valuable public companies and its first trillion-dollar businesses are built on digital platforms that bring together two or more market actors and grow through network effects. The top-ranked companies by market capitalization are Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet (Google’s parent company). Facebook, Alibaba, and Tencent are not far behind. As of November 2019, these seven companies represented more than $5.4 trillion in market value, and all of them are platform businesses.