Multi-homing and software firm performance: Towards a research agenda




Hyrynsalmi S., Mäntymäki M., Baur A.

Arpan Kumar Kar,P. Vigneswara Ilavarasan, M.P. Gupta, Yogesh K. Dwivedi, Matti Mäntymäki, Marijn Janssen, Antonis Simintiras, Salah Al-Sharhan

Conference on e-Business, e-Services and e-Society

PublisherSpringer Verlag

2017

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Digital Nations – Smart Cities, Innovation, and Sustainability. I3E 2017

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

10595

978-3-319-68556-4

978-3-319-68557-1

0302-9743

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68557-1_39



Joining or leaving a platform ecosystem is a key strategic decision for software developers. ‘Multi-homing’ is strategy in which a company distributes its products via more than one platform ecosystem in parallel. ‘Single-homing’ is an opposite strategy in which the software is being distributed exclusively via a single platform ecosystem. On one hand, multi-homing can increase customer reach in markets where customers typically single-home. On the other hand, creating a new version of the software product for multi-homing purposes generates, e.g., conversion, maintenance, and marketing cost. Interestingly, multi-homing as a strategic choice in software business has thus far have received surprisingly little academic scrutiny. In particular, there is very little information on whether multi-homing is an economically viable distribution strategy. To fill in this void, we explore the financial performance between single-homers and multi-homers in mobile application ecosystems. We investigate how the decision to multi-home affects firm performance with a sample of mobile application developers. The results imply that the revenue growth has been faster among single-homers while our dataset is biased towards single-homers. This calls for additional research comparing the two distribution strategies. This paper acts as a starting point for a research agenda in order to better understand multi-homing a strategic choice in software business.



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