Edge Platforms

Edge Platforms

"Edge competencies are often expressed in the real world through edge platforms. Edge platforms have a numer of key features. The most familiar are that they're often massively distributed, and open-access.

These two features alone make edge platforms often hugely disruptive to the economics of traditional, pre-network industries. Why? Because, strategically, they are enormous sources of leverage: they can usually almost completely vaporize the fixed costs of production from most of the resources that are necessary and sufficient to compete in those industries.

This is a form of coordination arbitrage: these students are arbitraging the fact that coordination, in Hollywood, is relatively overpriced. That is, studio execs, stars, agents, etc cost a great deal - but are returning less and less relative to new forms of competition at the edge, which exploit cheap coordination. We can think of many, many other examples: Wikipedia, AdWords, Last.fm, to name just a few." (http://www.bubblegeneration.com/2005/12/research-note-how-edge-platforms.cfm)