[6] Examples include buyers and sellers at an auction; readers and advertisers of a newspaper; and people at an online dating service.
[9] According to Jim Allchin, the former Platforms Group Vice President, the division also provides support to millions of software developers focused on high-performance and affordable technologies.
[11] Recent examples of two-sided platforms that successfully attracted both consumers and developers include Apple iPhone,[12][13] Nintendo Wii,[14] Adobe Flash,[15] and Microsoft Windows.
The characteristics of successful platform evangelists[18] and salespersons[19] are essentially identical, including deep product knowledge, empathy, humor, integrity, communication skills, positive attitude, infectious enthusiasm, a sincere desire to help others, etc.
It is the responsibility of the platform evangelist to ensure that each developer enablement resource comes into existence in a timely manner.
This tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which the platform which is initially perceived to have the highest lifetime profit opportunity tends to accumulate the most applications, which then makes it more attractive to consumers, which makes it more attractive to developers, etc., in a virtuous cycle, until a critical mass (also known as a tipping point) is reached, such that it out-competes the other platforms…and eventually does indeed come to offer the highest lifetime profit potential, as prophesied.
[26] Lock-in tends to make a de facto standard impervious to incremental competition, such that only a disruptive innovation can displace it.
[29] However, owning the first platform to establish a critical mass of complementary goods, with high switch-out costs, can create first-mover advantages that can go a long way towards ensuring that one gets a viable share of the mature market.
Whether this is, in turn, a means to the end of maximizing share on the market's consumer side, or vice versa, depends on the platform vendor's pricing strategy.
Most of the theory and practice of platform evangelism, as influenced by these theoretical underpinnings, has yet to be comprehensively documented, and is therefore not available to novice evangelists or their managers.