Van SMAC naar AI

Why Dutch Corporate Transformation (1990-2025) Reveals the Fundamental Strategic Choice

Between 1990 and 2025, Dutch multinational corporations confronted a strategic question that defined their futures: should they create platforms and lead their industries, or optimize operations and follow platform leaders?

This wasn't an abstract theoretical debate. It was a concrete choice with measurable consequences, visible across three distinct technological waves:

• Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud (SMAC) Era (2008-2016): Network effects replaced economies of scale as the primary source of competitive advantage.
• Platform Consolidation (2016-2022): Companies either established platform positions or accepted dependency on platform leaders.
• Agentic AI Revolution (2022-present): Artificial intelligence transformed platforms from infrastructure into autonomous coordination systems.

The Netherlands provides an ideal laboratory for studying this transformation. As a small, open economy with globally competitive firms, Dutch companies couldn't rely on domestic market protection. They had to compete on global platforms or create them.

About the Author & Theoretical Foundations

This book emerges from twenty-five years of observing Dutch corporate transformation from multiple vantage points—as strategy consultant, board advisor, and innovation investor. Like watching a long tennis match from different seats in the stadium, each perspective revealed patterns invisible from other angles.

The intellectual foundation draws from four streams of thinking that converged to explain what we were witnessing:

Platform Economics: Geoffrey Parker, Marshall Van Alstyne, and Sangeet Paul Choudary's Platform Revolution (2016) revealed how network effects create exponential rather than linear scaling, fundamentally altering competitive dynamics.

Technological Disruption: Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee's Machine, Platform, Crowd (2017) and Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma (1997) explained why operational excellence can become a strategic limitation when ecosystem orchestration replaces product optimization.

Economic Polarization: Tyler Cowen's Average is Over (2013) predicted that technology would eliminate middle-ground positioning, creating permanent division between above-average and below-average performers.

Surveillance Capitalism: Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) illuminated how data extraction creates new forms of economic coordination and dependency.

Corporate Transformation: Richard Dobbs, James Manyika, and Jonathan Woetzel's No Ordinary Disruption (2015) demonstrated how multiple exponential forces interact to create structural rather than cyclical change.

These frameworks, applied to thirty-five years of Dutch corporate evolution, reveal why the choice between creating platforms and following them has become the fundamental strategic decision of our era.