What unites Google and Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, Siemens and GE,
Uber and Airbnb? Across a wide range of sectors, these firms are
transforming themselves into platforms: businesses that provide the
hardware and software foundation for others to operate on. This
transformation signals a major shift in how capitalist firms operate and
how they interact with the rest of the economy: the emergence of
�platform capitalism�.
This book critically examines these new business forms, tracing their
genesis from the long downturn of the 1970s to the boom and bust of the
1990s and the aftershocks of the 2008 crisis. It shows how the
fundamental foundations of the economy are rapidly being carved up among
a small number of monopolistic platforms, and how the platform
introduces new tendencies within capitalism that pose significant
challenges to any vision of a post-capitalist future. This book will be
essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the most
powerful tech companies of our time are transforming the global
economy."