Just last week, in Episode 9 of “So What?”, I was discussing advantages of building products like cutting-edge LLMs in-house for Big Tech. One of the points I highlighted was the ability to customize and align the product with your own unique portfolio and ecosystem. You can watch the episode here:

In case you missed the news, ChatGPT is getting a Mac app but Windows version is yet to come. This is despite the fact that years before OpenAI became a household name, Microsoft pumped billions of dollars into it.

There is obviously nothing going on behind the curtains here. Mac has been a preferred OS for developers for a while so it made business sense to focus on Mac first. The fact is Microsoft did get a good deal of exclusive advantage from this partnership. However, as you can tell from the articles and headlines, it provided an opportunity for skeptics to look at it from various perspectives.

There is also the fact that Microsoft could have used this opportunity to break the mold of Mac being the preferred OS for developers.

These aspects are just illustrative. The key point here is that if you have the resources, bringing such capabilities in-house sooner rather than later is critical. But if you must use the partnership model for a while, there needs to be a strategic approach to formulate the terms of partnership, early on.

Organizations can benefit significantly from ecosystems and partnerships. However, there needs to be a strategic and structured approach to building ecosystems and partnerships. Otherwise, there is a chance that you may miss extracting the full value of these ecosystems and partnerships.