| Internal or product platforms | Sony creating the various versions of the Walkman upon five basic architectures | Wheelwright and Clark (1992), Meyer and Lehnerd (1997) and Gawer and Cusumano (2014) |
| Industry-wide or innovation platforms | IBM, Microsoft and Intel offered personal computers where external complementors offer software | Gawer and Cusumano (2014), Cusumano et al. (2019) and Brillinger et al. (2020) |
| Multi-sided or transaction platforms | Airbnb, Uber | Gawer and Cusumano (2014), Hagiu and Wright (2015), Cusumano et al. (2019) and Trabucchi and Buganza (2020) |