MIT Sloan Management Review Article on All Platforms Are Not Equal

Why Airbnb will always be a better business than Uber

The dramatic influence of the internet on how businesses operate and the emergence of a handful of gigantic, digitally enabled corporations have led to breathless pronouncements regarding the importance of a peculiar new class of monopolies built on digital platforms. These platforms, it is argued, fuel network effects that lead inexorably to winner-take-all marketplaces.1 This perspective is invariably coupled with infectious optimism and investment euphoria regarding the extraordinary scale and strength of network-effects businesses.