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

Managing software ecosystems through partnering.

Software vendors and owners of software platforms function within a network of actors relevant to their business, called a software ecosystem (Burkard et al 2012; Messerschmitt & Szyperski 2003). A software ecosystem is defined as a set of actors functioning as a unit and interacting with a shared market for software and services, together with the relationships among them (Jansen et al 2009, p.1). Within such an ecosystem, a large software vendor or platform owner has the role of software ecosystem orchestrator (Jansen et al 2009). Since their software product, platform or even the organization as a whole is the binding factor within the ecosystem, these large software vendors or platform owners are the main parties responsible for managing and expanding the ecosystem. Typical types of actors within a software ecosystem are suppliers that supply software or services to the software vendor, system integrators that implement software products or platforms for the customer and partners (Popp & Meyer 2010). Actors within the ecosystem exchange products, services or assets and possibly receive compensation in return. This continuous exchange makes software ecosystems an important part of the business model of software companies (Popp 2011)

Complementor embeddedness in platform ecosystems : the case of google apps

Platforms and their marketplaces with complementarities are prominent in the software industry. As the proprietary platform itself exhibits elementary or generic functionality, platform owners depend on a complementor ecosystem populated by third-parties. At present, little is known about mechanisms at play in proprietary ecosystems. Addressing this deficiency, this paper investigates the Google Apps ecosystem through statistical and network analysis. Results show that the Google Apps ecosystem is sparsely connected, the majority of complementors develops one application (83%) and does not have visible relationships (73%). Furthermore, there is a positive relationship between the number of applications a complementor develops and the number of relationships it establishes. The research method and results presented can be used by practitioners as a reference to evaluate their structural position in the ecosystem, while it provides researchers with a quantification of ecosystem characteristics