Competing on a Common Platform
Description
I find that the creation of a non-profit foundation was significant in attracting multi-vendor support and that there is increasing evidence of pluralistic contribution and leadership. I identify areas where member interests converge and diverge and explore how the foundation, its rules, processes and ecosystem norms support both. I explore how members manage their new dependency on community managed software in concert with their own proprietary development processes.
This then raises the question of how some vendors, who are, in effect, accelerating the rate of commoditization of their own products by contributing to Eclipse, move up the stack and manage the sustained development of new sources of competitive differentiation. Firms contributing to Eclipse must negotiate what will be common while simultaneously identifying sources of differentiation for commercial offerings. Incompatibility can not provide an artificial source of competitive advantage.
Preliminary research suggests that when a smaller proportion of competitive difference is derived from intellectual property, time, information and knowledge advantages in process and execution may be more critical. While services may become more important to some large vendors, temporal control is another important way in which this tension is managed by all. One speculation is that if companies can learn to manage the rate of commoditization to effectively compete on a common platform than the rate of innovation within the industry could also increase.
This research advances a theoretical understanding of how firms manage the actual process of coopetition when engaged in shared development and explores how informal and formal boundaries are shaped to further those ends. It should also help firms planning to contribute to community managed platforms. With lessons learned from Eclipse, I offer some implications for firms in other industries that are considering how to collaborate in the production of shared resources that are core to their product development. Understanding how firms manage the development of multilateral common platforms while identifying sources of competitive differentiation may be crucial to understanding the dynamics of competition in industries that rely on compatible infrastructure or component innovations.