The Importance of Habitual Destinations in a Platform

In some ways we are all like Norm on Cheers. We are creatures of habit drawn to community. Once we have found our preferred destinations, it’s hard to pull us off our bar stools. This seems to be more pronounced in our corporate lives where the herd dynamic further slows the movement that drives change.

In the world of platforms, these “habitual destinations” play a key role- and are potentially the game changer for the next generation of platforms. They are the anchor tenants that seed the creation of the new platform.

For example in the consumer world of platforms, think of MySpace, Facebook and eBay. Their anchor tenants have generated a user community in the 100’s of millions that habitually frequent these destinations. This then becomes the ante to court an ecosystem of partners to develop value added capabilities to service the new marketplaces they create. You can see a virtuous cycle emerge; end users spend a greater percentage of their time doing more in the same destination- which in turn creates additional barriers to entry and switching costs to the benefit of the platform provider.

In the professional markets think Salesforce.com and WebEx. Each has an enormous following of professionals that habitually frequent their destinations. Each is also leveraging their anchor tenants as a gravitational force to attract third parties to contribute to the ecosystem. Again, from the end user perspective, you get more productivity from a single destination. And again there is an advantage in critical mass to discourage competition in that it creates higher barriers to entry and higher switching costs. Moreover, in the professional world, integration between solutions is important, and this is an inherent aspect to these platforms.

Each of these examples also highlights the other half of the habitual destination equation- community (or in business terms, collaboration). This is the disruptive part of the equation that threatens the entrenched players. The Window’s desktop is arguably the most dominant destination for any user, but it was designed to be an island (the p stands for personal…) and collaboration is the Achilles heel that threatens the Windows franchise as the defacto destination. In other words users are spending less time on the desktop and more time on collaborative (read web) destinations.

To summarize, the trend in next generation platforms is that they are anchored by a habitual destination, and built from the ground up on the foundation of community.