The most important question for our businesses today is: How will we stay relevant? It is absolutely critical to stay ahead of competitive trends, think of the approaches we want to adopt and begin implementing them NOW, so we don't have to struggle to play catch up. The promise of the future is that the world will be connected. Our platforms should be too. It won't be just about developing platforms. In fact the platforms we are building today will be inadequate to drive customer engagement and commerce of the future. Why is that? It's simply because the needs of our customers are connected. In fact, the focused and specific platforms of today will become components of much larger platforms. These larger interconnected platforms will logically arise as a result of collaboration between innovators and their individual platforms. They will connect with each other to complement their own capabilities, and probably also try to compete with one another. The big difference will be in how the logical platforms allow creation of context and value. As the world changes, we need to create a place in the new order of our customers' minds. The "Connected Company" framework in this book will lead you to do exactly that.