Exercising power in software ecosystems

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Companies in a software ecosystem must understand which power capabilities drive cooperation or generate conflicts. In this article, we analyze how power influences the relationships among companies in ecosystems formed by small-to-medium enterprises as well as in platform ecosystems governed by large keystones.Postprint (author's final draft

Can we ask you to collaborate?: analyzing app developer relationships in commercial platform ecosystems

Previous studies have emphasized the necessity for software platform owners to govern their platform ecosystem in order to create durable opportunities for themselves and the app developers that surround the platform. To date, platform ecosystems have been widely analyzed from the perspective of platform owners, however, how and to what extent app developers collaborate with their peers needs to be investigated further. In this article, we study the interfirm relationships among app developers in commercial platform ecosystems and explore the causes of variation in the network structure of these ecosystems. By means of a comparative study of four commercial platform ecosystems of Google (Google Apps and Google Chrome) and Microsoft (Microsoft Office365 and Internet Explorer), we illustrate substantial variation in the extent to which app developers initiated interfirm relationships. Further, we analyze how the degree of enforced entry barriers to the app store, the use of a partnership model, and the domain of the software platform that underpins the ecosystem affect the properties of these commercial platform ecosystems. We present subsequent explanations as a set of propositions that can be tested in future empirical researc

Can we ask you to collaborate?:analyzing app developer relationships in commercial platform ecosystems

Previous studies have emphasized the necessity for software platform owners to govern their platform ecosystem in order to create durable opportunities for themselves and the app developers that surround the platform. To date, platform ecosystems have been widely analyzed from the perspective of platform owners, however, how and to what extent app developers collaborate with their peers needs to be investigated further. In this article, we study the interfirm relationships among app developers in commercial platform ecosystems and explore the causes of variation in the network structure of these ecosystems. By means of a comparative study of four commercial platform ecosystems of Google (Google Apps and Google Chrome) and Microsoft (Microsoft Office365 and Internet Explorer), we illustrate substantial variation in the extent to which app developers initiated interfirm relationships. Further, we analyze how the degree of enforced entry barriers to the app store, the use of a partnership model, and the domain of the software platform that underpins the ecosystem affect the properties of these commercial platform ecosystems. We present subsequent explanations as a set of propositions that can be tested in future empirical researc

Can We Ask You To Collaborate? Analyzing App Developer Relationships in Commercial Platform Ecosystems

Previous studies have emphasized the necessity for software platform owners to govern their platform ecosystem in order to create durable opportunities for themselves and the app developers that surround the platform. To date, platform ecosystems have been widely analyzed from the perspective of platform owners. However, how and to what extent app developers collaborate with their peers needs to be investigated further. In this article, we study the interfirm relationships among app developers in commercial platform ecosystems and explore the causes of variation in the network structure of these ecosystems. By means of a comparative study of four commercial platform ecosystems of Google (Google Apps and Google Chrome) and Microsoft (Microsoft Office365 and Internet Explorer), we illustrate substantial variation in the extent to which app developers initiated interfirm relationships. Further, we analyze how the degree of enforced entry barriers to the app store, the use of a partnership model, and the domain of the software platform that underpins the ecosystem affect the properties of these commercial platform ecosystems. We present subsequent explanations as a set of propositions that can be tested in future empirical research

Platform Openness: A Systematic Literature Review and Avenues for Future Research

Open platforms such as Facebook or Android have stimulated innovation and competition across industries. Information systems literature has analyzed platforms from a variety of perspectives. The aim of this paper is to synthesize and integrate extant interdisciplinary research on the concept of platform openness. Towards this end, we conducted a literature review and analyzed the results with deductive and inductive coding approaches. We identified five distinct themes: measurement frameworks, implementation mechanisms, drivers for opening and closing platforms, trade-offs in designing openness, and the impact of changing openness on ecosystems. We propose three avenues for future research: finding the optimal degree of platform openness, integrating perspectives on accessibility and transparency, and analyzing the influence of openness and other factors with configurational theories. This paper contributes to research on platforms by laying out the main themes and perspectives in the research stream of platform openness and by identifying areas for future research

DO NEGATIVE EXTERNALITIES AFFECT PLATFORM MEMBERSHIP CONDITIONS? THE IMPACT OF MORAL AND REGULATORY LEGITIMACY ON PLATFORM GOVERNANCE

When allowing third parties to join their platforms, platform owners run the risk of attracting harmful third-party complements. Existing literature considers that low-quality offerings negatively affect cross-side user satisfaction and attractiveness, ultimately harming the platform\u27s reputation and stability. However, recent events show that negative externalities from third-party offerings can also motivate platform sponsors to adapt their membership conditions. Existing platform literature does not explain the underlying theoretical mechanisms. In this paper, we examine why platform sponsors adjust the conditions that govern third parties joining their platforms in response to negative externalities. We apply legitimacy theory to a critical case on a payment transaction platform. We find that negative externalities affect both moral and regulatory legitimacy, which in turn motivate the platform sponsor to adjust the conditions under which third parties may join the platform

Recomendação de desenvolvedores externos para projetos de software baseada na análise de contribuições prévias

The software development industry has evolved in the recent years and new challenges have emerged. Among these changes came Software Ecosystems, a new development paradigm, where external contributors support software production by providing solutions that complement a common platform for these developers. Due to the large number of technologies, frameworks and domains that an ecosystem can host, an equally large number of contributors acquainted with varied topics of their knowledge and skills have also emerged. However, recruiting collaborators with desired characteristics becomes a complex task due to the varying degrees of knowledge and skill that each developer has in their various competencies. Given this, we present a architecture of a recommendation system (RS) supported by an ontology capable of recommending collaborators who have shown expertise in the topics of interest. In order to do so, the RS uses retrieval expertise techniques to score the developers´ level of knowledge about topics represented in a query. The architecture is then able to provide the contextual information of the recommendation, i.e., a visualization of where one can find the knowledge topics that led to the recommendation of each contributor. Proof of Concepts were conducted on two software ecosystems to demonstrate feasibility of the architecture, which have shown evidence that the architecture is able to perform recommendations and still offers context information, important to the decision-making process over the recommendations made.A indústria de desenvolvimento de software evoluiu nos últimos anos e novos desafios surgiram. Dentre estas mudanças surgiram os ecossistemas de software, um novo paradigma de desenvolvimento, onde colaboradores externos apoiam a produção de software ao disponibilizar soluções que complementam uma plataforma comum a estes desenvolvedores. Devido à grande diversidade de tecnologias, frameworks e domínios que um ecossistema pode abrigar, a todo momento surgem colaboradores com variados tópicos de conhecimento e habilidades. Entretanto, recrutar colaboradores com as características desejadas se torna um trabalho complexo devido aos diferentes graus de conhecimento e habilidades que cada colaborador tem em suas diversas competências. Diante disso, apresenta-se uma arquitetura de um sistema de recomendação (SR) apoiado por uma ontologia capaz de recomendar colaboradores que tenham mostrado expertise nos tópicos de interesse. Para tanto, o SR utiliza técnicas da área de expertise retrieval para pontuar o grau de aderência dos colaboradores sobre os tópicos de conhecimento representados em uma query. A arquitetura é então capaz de fornecer as informações de contexto da recomendação, ou seja, uma visualização sobre onde pode-se encontrar os tópicos de conhecimento que levaram à recomendação de cada colaborador. Provas de conceito foram realizadas sobre dois ecossistemas de software para verificar a viabilidade da arquitetura, as quais mostraram indícios de que a arquitetura é capaz de realizar recomendações, e ainda oferece informações de contexto que são importantes à tomada de decisão sobre as recomendações realizadas.CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superio

Essays on Business Value Creation in Digital Platform Ecosystems

Digital platforms and the surrounding ecosystems have garnered great interest from researchers and practitioners. Notwithstanding this attention, it remains unclear how and when digital platforms create business value for platform owners and complementors. This three-essay dissertation focuses on understanding business value creation in digital platform ecosystems. The first essay reviews and synthesizes literature across disciplines and offers an integrative framework of digital platform business value. Advised by the findings from the review, the second and third essays focus on the value creation for platform complementors. The second essay examines how IT startups entering a platform ecosystem at different times can strategically design their products (i.e., product diversification across platform architectural layers and product differentiation) to gain competitive advantages. Longitudinal evidence from the Hadoop ecosystem demonstrates that product diversification has an inverted U-shaped relationship with complementors success, and such an effect is more salient for earlier entrants than later entrants. Earlier entrants should develop products that are similar to other ecosystem competitors to reduce uncertainty whereas later entrants are advised to explore market niche and differentiate their products.The third essay investigates how platform complementors strategies and products co-evolve over time in the co-created ecosystem network environment. Our longitudinal analysis of the Hadoop ecosystem indicates that complementors technological architecture coverage and alliance exploration strategies increase their product evolution rate. In turn, complementors with faster product evolution are more likely to explore new partners but less likely to cover a wider range of the focal platforms technological layers in subsequent periods. Network density, co-created by all platform complementors, weakens the effects of complementors strategies on their product evolution but amplifies the effects of past product evolutions on strategies.This three-essay dissertation uncovers various understudied competitive strategies in the digital platform context and enriches our understanding of business value creation in digital platform ecosystems