What's The Difference Between A Software Product And A Platform?

Back at the early dawn of prehistory, we used to reserve our use of the word platform to denote a complete software programming development environment and underlying subsystem with language, runtime, components and all associated libraries and binaries. The result of using a platform (Microsoft .NET or Java for example) was a software application, which in later years even your grandmother would start to call “an app” – and then the Earth cooled.