The influence of user feedback on complementary innovation in platform ecosystems: NLP evidence on the value of multihoming

We study how user feedback affects innovation of multihomed applications within and across platform ecosystems. Therefore, we conduct a quantitative NLP based case study. Our sample consists of 10 multihomed applications with more than 325,000 user reviews on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platform between January and March 2021. We analyze how user reviews translate into functional feature releases of the selected applications within and across platforms. We report three findings. First, we find that about 61% of the functional feature improvements on both platforms were previously demanded by users in the form of user feedback. Second, we show that user feedback of iOS users is more likely to be incorporated compared to Android users’ feedback. Finally, we observe that about 10% of feature releases are inspired by cross-platform feedback, providing initial evidence that user feedback from multihoming applications might stimulate cross-platform innovation and enhance the applications’ quality and innovativeness

Gravitation of SaaS-centric cloud platforms

SaaS-centric Cloud platforms, i.e., platforms that provide marketplaces to trade and execute SaaS solutions, are becoming increasingly important. In creating marketplaces, platform providers open new sales and marketing opportunities for third-party developers of Cloud-based software. Prior research focused on platforms’ development capabilities but left their distribution and transaction facilitation capabilities largely unconsidered. Nonetheless, distribution channels constitute a crucial element in the business model of SaaS-centric Cloud platforms. Addressing this gap, our study examines how and why SaaS-centric Cloud platforms gravitate, i.e., which factors help them attract and retain participants. Our qualitative exploration is based on four case studies of different SaaS-centric Cloud platforms. Our findings suggest the existence of two sets of catalyzing and inhibiting factors for platform gravitation which are contingent upon the platform type. This study contributes to research on Cloud platforms, ecosystem governance and integration issues related to Cloud computing. The examination of the identified factors opens promising avenues for future research