flickr photo via aeu044117
Turns out it's pretty simple. As Gregory Hill (@mrsenorhill) says, it's all about the platform. At The Disruption Department he describes that,
platforms, in the computing and electronic fields, are common architectures or frameworks that allow developers to create applications or behaviors that can be executed on something stable, and then shared.As it goes in the Twittersphere, the same weekend Gregory blogged the 'platform' post, someone sent me this:
What a brilliant visual representation of the platform concept, I think. No matter how much the original version of Windows was modified to fit an improved context, the original integrity of the program (the platform) remained viable and foundational.