Ask ten people in tech what a "platform" is and you'll get ten answers, or a shrug. The word is everywhere: platform teams, platform strategy, platform engineering, "our new customer platform." But if you watch how it's actually used, the working definition is usually something like an app that's big or important enough that we want to give it a special label. That's not a definition. That's a promotion. Recently I was talking with an architect who argued the term is just too nebulous to p...