Platforming is all the rage. Turn your product into a "platform" that others can build on or connect to. If you don't have a "developer program" you're just so... pre-millenium.

So why are Skype's investors and management driving a platforming strategy? What role can it play in Skype's overall strategy?

Not in any particular order:

• Great T-shirts.
• Resource Gravity. Partners can bring human and financial capital to expand your capabilities beyond your own resources. Skype may have more than 100 engineers, for example, but there's no reason that thousands of developers can't be part of an extended development family. There's an art to creating the gravity that attracts the right people at the right time.
• Market Expansion. Few companies meet all needs. Partners can reach and serve markets you cannot. Some are cultural, sociological or geographic. Others involve technological barriers.
• Sensor Network. Threats and opportunities are often found by your friends.
• Technology Brokering. You never know when a peripheral capability becomes core. So it's useful to have friends from whom you can license the technology. Or whom you can absorb. Innovation often occurs at the edge.
• Biodiversity and Risk Buffers. Partner networks let others take a wide variety of risks on behalf of the community. Some will be hurt or die from those risks. But the ecology learns and adapts.

You can read about strategic alliances, keiretsu, value networks, and other ways of partnering up. But Skype has at least three partnering initiatives:

1. Independent developers.
2. Telecom and mobile technology partners.
3. Marketing and distribution partners.

They must succeed in each of these. In the next few days, we'll be looking at how well Skype is serving its independent developer community.