I'd be curious if anyone has a good example of a platform that's more like a fruit basket and one that's clearly fruit salad

I'm getting lost in the analogy. 😄 Is the difference that fruit salad is a fruit basket in smaller pieces?

I think the analogy only works when comparing two offerings. I don’t think you can say this offering is a fruit basket or fruit salad. As you can always go higher or lower. To stay with the image. The actual fruit salad could be considered a “fruit basket” when compared with an organized picknick which would then be a “fruit salad”. Does this make sense?

It could be I'm not caffeinated enough yet. :)

A related analogy I've seen used a lot is that the value is in the seams

Thanks for the thoughts 🙂 A fruit salad isn't just a collection of pieces, they are specifically chosen and prepared for a concrete use case

An example I can think of is "Kubernetes" as a service, as opposed to "Elastic Kubernetes Service"

It was harder to get that into a 30 second segment in a 15 minute keynote...

By which I mean that EKS has integrations to a wider ecosystem (storage, networking et al)

re. picnic: agreed, there's often layered platforms above or below. The analogy might get a bit tricky at that point 🙂

I sympathize with the time limit. I was struggling with 30 min and then saw it was 15 and had to ruthlessly cut.

The fruit salad metaphor tries to speak to the platform "gestalt" if that's not too much a cop-out word. Here's the original blog post on it (I expanded it into a chapter in the Platform Strategy book) https://architectelevator.com/architecture/platforms-fruit-salad/

If by “fruit salad” you mean an integrated platform of carefully chosen tools for specific capabilities instead of a collection of options, yes I agree that's best. I touch on that in my talk too.

Caffeine kicked in 😉