Michael Cusumano
Most leadership teams still think about competition the way they think about products: build a better one and customers follow. Platforms break that logic. The harder question is when to compete as a product, when to open an ecosystem, and how to avoid funding rivals you have just enabled.
Michael Cusumano is the MIT Sloan professor whose work on platforms, software, and digital strategy gives leadership teams a framework for competing in winner-take-most markets.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Michael Cusumano
- He wrote the book leaders cite when they argue about platform strategy. The Business of Platforms, with Gawer and Yoffie, is the reference text for how Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft built their positions, and where new entrants can still find leverage.
- He has spent three decades studying how software companies actually make money, from Microsoft Secrets through The Business of Software to current work on generative AI as the next platform layer.
- He bridges Western and Japanese industry. Two Fulbright Fellowships, ten years working in Japan, and a former dean role at Tokyo University of Science give him a working view of competitive dynamics across both markets.
- He is operator-adjacent. Roughly 100 consulting engagements with organisations including NASA, the World Bank, and the Bank of England, plus a dozen public-company board seats, mean the framework is pressure-tested against real strategic decisions.
Biography highlights
- SMR Distinguished Professor of Management at MIT Sloan; Faculty Director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship; Co-Director of the MIT System Design and Management Program.
- Author or co-author of 14 books, including The Business of Platforms (2019), Strategy Rules (2015), Staying Power (2010), Platform Leadership (2002), and Microsoft Secrets (1995).
- Strategy Rules has been translated into 18 languages; Microsoft Secrets into 14.
- Writes the Technology Strategy and Management column for Communications of the ACM; former editor-in-chief and chairman of MIT Sloan Management Review.
- Recipient of the 2019 Abbie Griffin High Impact Award from the Journal of Product Innovation Management; IEEE Software 25th-Anniversary Top Pick.
- Princeton (BA), Harvard (PhD); two Fulbright Fellowships; former Special Vice President and Dean of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Tokyo University of Science.
Biography
Platform businesses follow a different physics from product businesses. The companies sitting at the top of every market-cap league table, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, did not get there by selling better products. They built two-sided markets, opened controlled access to complementors, and used network effects to compound advantage. Cusumano’s work, with Annabelle Gawer and David Yoffie, is the reference scholarship on why this works and when it does not.
His position at MIT Sloan reflects three decades of close study of the software industry. Microsoft Secrets, written with Richard Selby in 1995, was the first inside account of how a software company actually shipped product at scale. Platform Leadership followed in 2002, naming the pattern Intel, Microsoft, and Cisco had used to organise entire industries around themselves. The Business of Platforms, in 2019, extended the argument into the era of Amazon, Google, and Apple, separating what worked from what failed.
He is also one of the few strategy scholars who can credibly write about Silicon Valley and Tokyo in the same paragraph. Two Fulbrights, ten years working in Japan, a former dean role at Tokyo University of Science, and fluent Japanese have produced a comparative view of how Western and Asian firms approach scale, software, and ecosystem competition. The 2019 Abbie Griffin High Impact Award and an IEEE Software 25th-Anniversary Top Pick recognise the influence of that work inside the academic and engineering communities.
The current focus is generative AI as a new platform for applications development, which he argues will redraw competitive lines in software again, this time around model providers, infrastructure layers, and application developers. For boards trying to read where value will sit in the next stack, that is the live question, and the framework he has spent thirty years sharpening is the one being applied to it.
Key speaking topics
- Platform strategy and ecosystem competition
- The economics of software businesses
- Generative AI as a platform layer
- Digital strategy in winner-take-most markets
- Innovation and entrepreneurship inside large firms
- Competing across US and Japanese technology markets
- Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs
Ideal for
- Boards and executive committees stress-testing platform or ecosystem strategy
- CSOs and corporate development leaders evaluating how generative AI reshapes competitive position
- Technology and product leadership at firms moving from product to platform models
- CEO summits and senior leadership programmes covering digital strategy and software economics
Audience outcomes
- A working framework for deciding when to compete as a product and when to open a platform.
- A clear read on why some platforms compound and others collapse, with the named cases that prove the pattern.
- Sharper questions to bring to AI strategy debates, focused on where value accrues across the stack.
- A comparative view of how leading US and Japanese firms have built and defended platform positions.