Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Salesforce.com, Amazon, Microsoft and others are in pursuit of creating the dominant platforms of the IT industry. Each one of them claim to have millions of users, applications and advertisers on their platforms. The first versions of these platforms were internally facing -- allowing them to easily develop applications. The next generation of these platforms will allow other companies to use these platforms to launch applications that make use of data that are stored by these platforms. For example, the social networks data that are present in these platforms can be used to reach potential customers. Another potential outcome would be the creation of applications that are interoperable with applications created by third parties.
There are two lessons here. First, create your own internal platforms that have the ability to scale and share like the ones created by Google and Yahoo. At a minimum, this will create internal efficiencies. This also creates options to interact with other companies in their ecosystems. The second lesson is look at these platforms as infrastructure or plumbing that can be exploited for creating proprietary applications. We are begining to see companies look at these platforms with an eye to emulate and exploit.