Information rules: a strategic guide to the network economy
Information rules: a strategic guide to the network economy
Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure
Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure
Microsoft Secrets: How the World's Most Powerful Software Company Creates Technology, Shapes Markets, and Manages People
Design Rules: The Power of Modularity Volume 1
Design Rules: The Power of Modularity Volume 1
The Triumph of Ethernet: Technological Communities and the Battle for the LAN Standard
The Triumph of Ethernet: Technological Communities and the Battle for the LAN Standard
Piloting Palm: The inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry
Platform Leadership
Sourcing By Design: Product Complexity and the Supply Chain
Management Science
Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software
Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software
Dynamic Mixed Duopoly: A Model Motivated by Linux vs. Windows
Management Science
Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research
Organizing for Innovation in the Digitized World
Organization Science
First-Party Content and Coordination in Two-Sided Markets
Management Science
A comparative analysis of cross-platform development approaches for mobile applications
Proceedings of the 6th Balkan Conference in Informatics
Opening Up the Smart Home: A Classification of Smart Living Service Platforms
International Journal of E-Services and Mobile Applications
The Journal of Strategic Information Systems
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This paper studies two fundamentally distinct approaches to opening a technology platform and their different impacts on innovation. One approach is to grant access to a platform and thereby open up markets for complementary components around the platform. Another approach is to give up control over the platform itself. Using data on 21 handheld computing systems (1990--2004), I find that granting greater levels of access to independent hardware developer firms produces up to a fivefold acceleration in the rate of new handheld device development, depending on the precise degree of access and how this policy was implemented. Where operating system platform owners went further to give up control (beyond just granting access to their platforms) the incremental effect on new device development was still positive but an order of magnitude smaller. The evidence from the industry and theoretical arguments both suggest that distinct economic mechanisms were set in motion by these two approaches to opening.