Publications
Publications
- 2019
- HBS Working Paper Series
Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 17 The Wintel Standards-based Platform
Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to use the theory of bottlenecks laid out in previous chapters to better understand the dynamics of an open standards-based platform. I describe how the Wintel platform evolved from 1990 through 2000 under joint sponsorship of Intel and Microsoft. I first describe a series of technical bottlenecks that arose in the early 1990s concerning the “bus architecture” of IBM-compatible PCs. Intel’s management of buses demonstrates how, under conditions of distributed supermodular complementarity, a platform sponsor can reconfigure the modular structure of a technical system, property rights within the system, and its own zone of authority to increase system-wide throughput, while protecting its own strategic bottleneck from disintermediation. I go on to describe how Microsoft used platform envelopment to establish a second strategic bottleneck in productivity software and later to respond to the threat of disintermediation from platform-independent internet browsers. I end the chapter by discussing the conditions under which shared platform sponsorship can be a long-term dynamic equilibrium.
Keywords
Open Platforms; Bottlenecks; Wintel Platform; Disintermediation; Information Infrastructure; Applications and Software; Business History; Digital Platforms; Computer Industry
Citation
Baldwin, Carliss Y. "Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 17 The Wintel Standards-based Platform." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-055, November 2019.