a global economy driven by platforms and APIs

What is an API? An API may be accessed programmatically. One may ask for a service without speaking to another human being. (self service) In interfacing with APIs remote services appear to be local. The end user does not care how the resource being used is manufactured or where and does not have to. All that is abstracted away. At a SXSW event on APIs I saw yesterday, the star was Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. He was interviewed by Echo CEO Khris Loux, whose company does media streaming stuff. The central assertions that Werner seems to wish to communicate were that firstly when he opened up the Amazon marketplace as a venue for other vendors to sell upon it was a win-win for both Amazon and other parties, and that secondly and moreover there are other scenarios in which one rival exposing an API that all other rivals may use would be beneficial to everyone allowing competitors to have something of a symbiotic relationship through a common channel! Werner suggested that AWS (Amazon Web Services) allowed Amazon to have the largest catalog in the world which it could not have had otherwise. It is not a winner-take-all model as while the nature of the API clearly benefits Amazon it also is a boon for smaller entities who may now reach a wider-than-previous-possible audience in their sales efforts. Pharmaceutical companies in America have to record a degree of data on their rollouts and studies to feed back to regulatory agencies in name of meeting red tape requirements which is heavy, not trivial. Per Werner, if just one of the six major players in the field would just expose its safety data via an API for the other five to use, it would benefit everyone. There is so much double work which could just go away leading to: greater efficiency, greater profits, greater good. A lot of corporate layers could be shed by just opening up APIs in Werner's thesis. Move Hyatt to Airbnb. Let CNN sell its video feeds so that not just CNN utilizes them. There was some devil's advocacy pushback from Khris as he tried to poke holes in Werner's vision. As Werner responded it seemed like AWS was already avoiding a few pitfalls which could really be serious pitfalls for other APIs. Werner suggested it probably best to not lock participants into contracts. The API model should not be the old school cell phone model. Werner said that Facebook controls everything which appears in its App Store suggesting that was too restrictive. I wonder if he meant Apple. I guess they both apply. For a party to offer such an API the API must be open and not favor the authoring party. There is not and should not be a code snippet within AWS which says:

if (Amazon) then
{
   GoLeft();
} else {
   GoRight();
}