Platform is a fancy way of not saying much

Platform is a poor word to use when writing about technology. That’s because the word is often used in a vague hand-waving way to refer to a piece of hardware or software, or both or something that is neither.

Like ‘thing’ the word comes in useful when the writer wants to avoid precision. Thing is often ambiguous.

Platform is the same. It can be padding, or it might be used to make something mundane sound more important. For example, there are writers who think “the Windows platform” is better than writing “the Windows operating system” or even plain old “Windows”.

Likewise “the Intel platform”, or any other variation.

Now these things can be platforms in the sense that they are technologies others can build on. But that nuance is often lost, glossed over or simply ignored.

Platform and environment

The same is true of ‘environment‘. An environment sounds like a pond with frogs hopping around. A rain forest is an environment.

To describe an operating system as an environment is pompous, wordy and just poor communications. It is an operating system, that’s the right noun to describe it.

Describing Windows as ‘software’ is acceptable. The word is accurate, if not precise. We can shorten operating system to OS when communicating with more tech-savvy readers.

There are people who think Apple’s tightly knit combination of software and hardware qualifies as a platform or an environment – though often people who use one term frequently use both to mean exactly the same thing.

It isn’t the same thing, the two words have distinct meanings. They are not interchangeable.

In the real world, software neatly integrated with hardware adds up to a first class computer.

If you want to talk about what goes on in the world of Apple computers, say so, be precise, be accurate, call it an Apple computer. That’s a perfectly respectable term. It is unambiguous.

Good writing is clear, concise and unambiguous. “Platform” and “environment” fail on all three counts.