The Greatest Tech Businesses Aren't Really Tech

Technology companies are a lot like contemporary art: Their valuations reflect narratives more than anything else, and it's just as important to devise the right framework to describe a phenomenon as it is to build a beautiful product. Two New York consultants, Alex Moazed and Nicholas Johnson, have suggested an interesting way of looking at most of Silicon Valley's biggest tech-company successes: They are all platforms.

The European Commission defines an online platform as a business that employs "information and communication technologies to facilitate interactions (including commercial transactions) between users, collection and use of data about these interactions, and network effects which make the use of the platforms with most users most valuable to other users." In their book, "Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy," Moazed and Johnson have a punchier definition: "a business that connects two or more mutually dependent groups in a way that benefits all sides."