Building an Ecosystem with an Open Digital Platform

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine how an actor builds an industry ecosystem by strategically developing an open digital platform. In the cloud service industry, the open digital platform is enabled by technology standards which are shared by the industry members. In order to establish the open digital platform with the standardization, actors in the industry need to coordinate multi-stakeholders who have conflicting interests and build a consensus about how services and technologies work on the platform. In this study, we investigate the case of HTML5 standardization and explore how Google develops the cloud service ecosystem building on the HTML5 as an open digital platform. Google harnessed multi-sided market structures that involve developers of HTML5 standards, cloud service developers, and end-users by adopting technologies developed by others, supporting collaborative software development in the ecosystem, and promoting benefits of the open digital platform (HTML5) to developers and end-users.