Neue Veröffentlichung

Together with his co-authors Thomas Huber, Jan Lepoutre, and Julien Malaurent from ESSEC Business School, Thomas Kude has published a new article that analyzes how large app developers, such as Spotify or Epic Games, were able to challenge the Apple iOS platform rules through non-market strategies. 

There is much to learn from this "counter-orchestration" process, but one thing that is particularly important is that it helps reconcile the ecosystem and platform perspectives, which are both useful, yet limited, models. 

The biological metaphor of an emergent ecosystem does not describe Apple iOS and the myriad of app developers well, because it does not account for the highly asymmetric structure, with a central platform owner who is much more powerful than all other actors. At the same time, a star-shaped 1:n model, often implicit in the platform literature, does not tell the full story either. Some complementors are much larger than others (often they are platforms in their own right), but still dwarfed by the central platform company. 

One thing to learn from this study is that these "complementor giants" play a critical role in platform governance. 

The paper is available as open access:  https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/isre.2023.0491