A long long time ago I wrote about companies being in control of their own long-term destiny. HP? Seriously? Silly me. And where’s Amazon? Anyways…

Not so long ago it used to be that a platform provider would give you a nice set of core widgets, along with access to the network stack, the local file system and a few lower-level graphics APIs. Good old times of shrink-wrapped software and platform updates that happened once every five years. In a good decade, that is.

Then the Internet happened, and after the dark old times of IE 6 a couple of big companies realized that not only they needed to have a fast and standards compliant browser available on their platforms, but that it’s such a basic block that it can’t be left to other parties. And so browsers developed by the platform providers became a table stake.

Somewhere in between, GPUs became more affordable to be included in the standard consumer-grade computers. Hello Moore’s law. They also happened to become quite powerful. Hello Moore’s law again. And OpenGL happened along the way, paving the road to gradually hardware accelerating all the things that find their way to the pixels. Along the way, local and streaming video became the expected part of a platform offering. Table stakes, if you will.

As a parallel track, platform providers started offering (built internally from scratch or acquired in a mad dash so as not to appear to fall behind) email services, ad platforms, office suite of apps (documents / presentations / spreadsheets) and search engines. Table stakes 2.0.

Then mobile happened. Not the kind focused on texting or plain-text email. Mobile as in having a frigging supercomputer in your pocket.

First came the app stores, along with the whole infrastructure around them such as authentication, serving downloads, replicating across multiple devices, user reviews, and search and recommendation engines. And oh, dipping the toes in the wonderfully macabre world of payments. Table stakes level++.

And you also had the other, more traditional media – books, movies, music and magazines. So the platform providers expanded the store capabilities to serve those, along with the matching applications to consume that content – reading books and magazines, watching movies and listening to music. Along the way came movie streaming, music streaming and music subscription services. You might also throw in the TV media players and TV streaming / casting sticks into the mix. Table stakes again.

The platforms themselves started branching into ever more form factors, from the traditional desktop screens and the just introduced mobile screens (a phone-sized screen and a tablet-sized screen) into a screen continuum. From phablets to TV screens, jumping into the wearable space (watches and glasses) and most recently into the automotive space. Along the way the platform providers started working on seamless integration flows between multiple devices owned by the same user. That included persisting the flow state and replicating it between devices, as well as unifying the user experience between the various “manifestations” of the underlying platform. And as the platform had successively more chunks moving into the cloud, the companies started investing ever more design resources into defining their own interface language and guidelines to help developers create apps that feel part of the platform. Table stakes raised another level.

And indeed the platform became this amorphous thing, with individual devices and screens at the edges and the data storage / sync layer in the middle. Platform providers offer their own storage and syncing solutions, with (mostly) generous free tier, spanning a variety of user-generated content, from documents to spreadsheets to, most recently, comprehensive photo services. And hey, let’s throw a mapping solution into the mix while we’re at it. Hello table stakes 2015.

There are quite a few pieces whose timelines I’ve generously rearranged in this article. There are a few pieces that were left out for brevity. To name just one, how about a bespoke system font that is used throughout the multiple manifestations of the specific platform. While we’re at it, how about the overall typesetting system in the world of high definition screens and the amazing “inventiveness” of various languages, living and dead. But I digress. Oh wait, how about a frigging voice-controlled assistant that predicts what you want even before you know that you want it?

Being a platform provider in 2015 is a big undertaking. And getting into the platform game might never have been as formidable. And when you’re in that game, you better up your game every year on the clock. At your own developer conference. But hey, no pain no gain. And the gains these days are enormous.