\section{Introduction}

Most companies struggle with the development of functionality and components shared by
multiple products. The strategy to share development costs of shared functionality and
components is known under many different labels: re-use, product families, product lines,
generic developments or platforms to name a few. We will use the term {\it platform} in this
paper.

\FigureImposeWidth{HMPAoutline}{Outline of this paper}{.6\textwidth}

This paper is partially, about half, based on existing \Gaudi material.
We want to address the following question in this paper:
``Q: How to manage platform architectures?''.
Figure~\ref{fig:HMPAoutline} shows the outline of this paper.
We start by discussing an actual platform case that covers more than 10 years elapsed time.
Next we explore {\it architecting} and {\it platforms}.
We zoom in on the {\it time dimension}, the {\it process} and the need to be {\it market driven}.
Finally we summarize by a means of a number of recommendations.

