Platform Leadership: How Intel, Microsoft and Cisco Drive Industry Innovation. (Bookshelf).

Platform Leadership: How Intel, Microsoft and Cisco Drive Industry Innovation. By Annabelle Gawer & Michael A. Cusumano. Harvard Business School Press, 305 pages. $29.95.

This book has an intriguing fundamental thesis: that a few large and highly successful technology companies have become "platform leaders -- companies that provide the technological foundation on which other products, services and systems are built." In general, it explores how these companies fashioned their strategies rather than certifying their dominance.

It's hard to argue with the choices made by Gawer and Cusumono, business professors at INSEAD and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, respectively, but the book is a bit lopsided: Three long chapters are devoted to Intel, where the authors did extensive interviews, versus just one chapter for Microsoft and Cisco combined. Clearly, the level of cooperation at Intel was far higher; the few comments from executives at Microsoft and Cisco come from speeches, their Web sites or other public sources. Another, shorter chapter looks at "wannabe" leaders like Palm Inc. and Linux.

Platform Leadership offers a detailed look at the strategies and the technologies that have taken these three to "the Holy Grail of high-tech industries," but it's a sometimes-uneasy marriage of strategy book and narrative covering a series of product developments that isn't fully successful at either approach. When the narrative gets into a thicket of individual product decisions, it's difficult to sense the overarching strategy.