Comment by toast0

> Except when they aren't, because in some niches, you actually have customers who want a platform. Cloud computing is an obvious example. It's just not the general case for consumer stuff.

I think Cloud computing as a successful business comes from the same process as suggested though. It's hard to build the platform as a business by itself.

Amazon's cloud is an offshoot of their internal elastic computing needs. Google's cloud sort of is too. Microsoft's cloud is an offshoot of their enterprise software business, same with Oracle's. IBM has been renting computers to businesses since like forever, but they used to make calculators and typewriters. I've never understood what Salesforce does, but I dunno, now it does it in the cloud rather than customer hosted?

There's some maybe purer cloud businesses, but mostly they started with a simpler hosting model and expanded into cloudy offerings.

If steam was always meant to be an all the games store, it certainly didn't start that way. When it launched, it was only for buying/using Valve's games, and it expanded later.