API Evangelism

Platform evangelism (also called developer relations, developer and platform evangelism, developer advocacy, or API evangelism) is the application of technology evangelism to a multi-sided platform. It seeks to accelerate the growth of a platform's commercial ecosystem of complementary goods, created by independent
third-party
developers, as a means to the end of maximizing the platform's market share. This initiative focuses on providing developers the resources to innovate, participate, and provide feedback to grow the platform.

Multi-sided platforms

A multi-sided platform creates value by bringing together two or more different groups who can create more value together than apart. Examples include buyers and sellers at an auction; readers and advertisers of a newspaper; and people at an online dating service. The platform vendor can profit by capturing a portion of the money that changes hands. Platform vendors can serve as '' de facto'' regulators of their markets.

An example of platform evangelism is the Developer and Platform Evangelism Division at Microsoft, which coordinates the personal computer (PC) and server's programming model. It also provides tools for the Microsoft.NET platform, facilitating synergies between this system's Enterprise Server products and the Windows platform. 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.

Developers and consumers

Many platforms have only two sides: one of consumers and the other of independent
third-party
developers. Independent developers produce and sell complementary goods, also called "platform applications," directly to the platform's consumers. These applications rely on the platform's services to function. Generally speaking, consumers prefer a platform with more and higher-value applications, while developers prefer a platform with more and higher-paying consumers.

Recent examples of two-sided platforms that successfully attracted both consumers and developers include Apple iPhone, Nintendo Wii, Adobe Flash, and Microsoft Windows.

Other examples include household electricity (for appliances), the farm tractor's three-point hitch (for farming implements), camera lens mounts (for interchangeable lenses), the Picatinny rail (for gun-mounted accessories), and media players such as record players, CD players, and DVD players (for media content).

Functions

Platform evangelism establishes and nurtures a platform ecosystem, which requires five simultaneous activities: 1) sales, 2) enablement, 3) feedback, 4) intelligence, and 5) regulation.

Ecosystem sales

Ecosystem sales is the attempt to convince third parties to develop complementary goods for the platform's commercial ecosystem. The characteristics of successful platform evangelists and salespersons are essentially identical, including deep product knowledge, empathy, humor, integrity, communication skills, positive attitude, infectious enthusiasm, a sincere desire to help others, etc. The primary difference is in "hunger for money" among salespersons. This is unlikely to be satisfied by technology evangelism, which is more likely to be a cost center than a profit center, and hence incapable of paying sales-like commissions.

Developer enablement resources

This aspect of platform evangelism can be seen as vendor-sponsored change agency in the diffusion of an innovation (the platform). As such, platform evangelism is responsible for creating the resources that enable developers to progress swiftly through the innovation adoption process ("developer enablement resources").

Each different phase of the platform adoption process requires different developer enablement resources. It is the responsibility of the platform evangelist to ensure that each developer enablement resource comes into existence in a timely manner.

Ecosystem feedback

Because developers will often choose an inferior platform if its rate of improvement suggests that it will soon become the superior platform, even the superior platform must improve rapidly. To facilitate this rapid improvement, platform evangelism organizes and champions the feedback of ecosystem developers within the platform vendor.

Ecosystem intelligence

Ecosystem intelligence gathers information about the activities and intentions of other platform vendors from sources in and around the developer ecosystem.

Ecosystem regulation

To avoid the market failure of multi-sided platforms, platform evangelism will often engage in '' de facto'' regulation of the commercial ecosystem that surrounds its platform. Such regulation combines legal, technological, informational, and other instruments (along with price setting) to minimize the costs of externalities, complexity, uncertainty, information asymmetry, and coordination problems.

Platform competition and platform evangelism

Often, many competing two-sided platforms―each offering roughly the same benefits on the developer side―start diffusing through a market at approximately the same time. Each platform's vendor competes with the other vendors, via platform evangelism, to gain market share among the market's potential developers.

Self-fulfilling prophecy

If it is expensive to re-develop an application to target a second (or third) platform, then developers will tend to adopt, first, the platform which they believe has the highest lifetime profit opportunity. 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. This makes it very important for a platform vendor to convince developers ''from the outset'', even before the platform becomes commercially available to consumers, that its platform will have the highest lifetime profit potential. This contributes to the high-tech industry's hype cycle.

Network effects, path dependence, and ''de facto'' standards

If the market has strong network effects, then those platforms which gain the fewest early adopters may cease to exist, making them unavailable to later potential adopters. This is