Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) has been flirting with the $1 trillion valuation milestone, putting it in the rarefied company of Apple, , Alphabet, and Amazon. 

All of these companies, Nvidia included, have at least one thing in common: They're platform businesses that generate revenue from enabling interactions and transactions between people and things, rather than simply selling a product. In other words, besides selling a product or service themselves, platforms facilitate the building of other businesses on top of their technology.

How do you build a platform business? One key ingredient is a tight integration between hard assets (in Nvidia's case semiconductors) and software. Nvidia's recent success thus exposes a major flaw in Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD): a lack of software to transform it from a peddler of chips into something much more. 

Continue reading

Source Fool.com