Invisible Engines: How Software Platforms Drive Innovation and Transform Industries
By David S. Evans, Andrei Hagiu, R. Schmalensee. 2006
470 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Winner of the Business, Management & Accounting category in the 2006 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Awards Competition presented by the Association of American Publishers, Inc. Software platforms are the invisible engines that have created, touched, or transformed nearly every major industry for the past quarter century. They power everything from mobile phones and automobile navigation systems to search engines and web portals. They have been the source of enormous value to consumers and helped some entrepreneurs build great fortunes. And they are likely to drive change that will dwarf the business and technology revolution we have seen to this point. Invisible Engines examines the business dynamics and strategies used by firms that recognize the transformative power unleashed by this new revolutiona revolution that will change both new and old industries. The authors argue that in order to understand the successes of software platforms, we must first understand their role as a technological meeting ground where application developers and end users converge. Apple, Microsoft, and Google, for example, charge developers little or nothing for using their platforms and make most of their money from end users; Sony PlayStation and other game consoles, by contrast, subsidize users and make more money from developers, who pay royalties for access to the code they need to write games. More applications attract more users, and more users attract more applications. And more applications and more users lead to more profits. Invisible Engines explores this story through the lens of the companies that have mastered this platform-balancing act. It offers detailed studies of the personal computer, video game console, personal digital assistant, smart mobile phone, and digital media software platform industries, focusing on the business decisions made by industry players to drive profits and stay a step ahead of the competition. Shorter discussions of Internet-based software platforms provide an important glimpse into a future in which the way we buy, pay, watch, listen, learn, and communicate will change forever. An electronic version of this book is available under a Creative Commons license.
Subfields: Literature and Literary Theory, Visual Arts and Performing Arts, Philosophy
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/007e45ffe0325fc8a1ed7602634409c6067e258d
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Literature and Literary Theory
In Visual Arts and Performing Arts
In Philosophy
Citations in the corpus
- Platform Ecosystems: How Developers Invert the Firm (2017, unknown): “The credit card and tele-communications industries are similarly layered (Evans et al. 2006).”
- Innovation, Openness, and Platform Control (2018, unknown): “Platform functionality can be extended by third parties and are subject to network effects (Eisenmann et al. 2011; Evans et al. 2006; Parker and Van Alstyne 2000a, b, 2005).”
- Explicating Dynamic Capabilities: The Nature and Microfoundations of (Sustainable) Enterprise Performance (2007, background): “Evans, Hagiu, and Schmalensee (2006) recognize multisided market interdependencies which likewise require a systems perspective.”
- Design theory for dynamic complexity in information infrastructures: the case of building internet (2010, background): “Platform designs draw upon architectural principles that organize IT capabilities into frameworks allowing the software to address a family of generic functional specifications that meet the needs of multiple, heterogeneous and growing user communities (Evans et al., 2006; Williams and Pollock, 2008”
- Multi-Sided Platforms (2015, unknown): “…integrated firm and the MSP, and by the possibility of professionals holding pessimistic expectations when deciding whether or not to join the vertically integrated firm or MSP. JEL classification: D4, L1, L5 Keywords: Two-sided markets, multi-sided platforms, reseller, vertical integration.”
- Digital innovation strategy: A framework for diagnosing and improving digital product and service innovation (2017, background): “Given digital technology’s central role in the radical restructuring of a number of industries (e.g., Evans, Hagiu, & Schmalensee, 2006), managers’ extensive interest in handling digital product and service innovation is not surprising.”
- Digital Business Strategy: Toward a Next Generation of Insights (2013, methodology): “We have made significant progress over the last decade focused on network effects and multisided business models focused on software and related areas (e.g., Evans et al. 2008).”
- Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom? An Early Look at Large Numbers of Software App Developers and Patterns of Innovation (2012, unknown): “Third-party apps development on handhelds has been an important motivating example for theory development on platforms and network effects ( cf. Evans et al. 2005, 2006, Rochet and Tirole 2003).”