An Empirical Study Of The Effect Of Software Platform Openness On The Dominant Enterprise Performance

The present era is the era of network economy, "Internet plus" model has been extended to all walks of life. In this context, not only for the Internet enterprises, non-internet companies also gradually begin to explore ways and means to connect with the Internet, to help enterprises to upgrade and promote the long-term sustainable development. Among them, building a software platform to create a self-centered eco-system of platform has become the main mode which the industry benchmark companies compete to take. The software platforms, which consist of dominant enterprises, the third-party developers and end users, are aimed at provide end-users with more diverse products and services. In this kind of platform, the dominant enterprise attract the third-party developers to access through the open interface, and eventually turn the platform product and services into actual revenue by end users through the services purchase and use. And in this process, the types and amounts of the open-source of platform have direct influence to the performance of the dominant enterprises, that is to say, the degree of openness of the platform is one of the important factors affecting the performance growth of the platform dominants enterprises.On the basis of analyzing the results of previous studies, this paper analyzed the construction and operation pattern of open software platform from the perspective of open resources. Combining the open innovation theory with the platform theory, the definition and connotation of the open degree of software platform are discussed, as well as the mechanism of its influence on the performance of the dominant enterprises. Next, we introduced the platform attractiveness as an moderating variable, and studied the moderate effects of different dimensions of the platform attractiveness on the open degree of platform influencing the performance of diminante enterprises. Through an empirical study on the related data of 31 software platform and their dominant enterprises in China, we got the following conclusions, firstly, open breadth has positive effect on the performance of platform leader, while open depth has inverted U-shaped effect on it. The moderating effects of the platform appearance in different dimensions are different. In the process of open breadth affecting the performance of dominant enterprise, the service level plays positive moderating role, but the user scale and commercial liquidation ability don't present this role. The user scale and commercial liquidation ability positively moderate the impact of open depth on performance of dominant enterprises, but the negatively moderating effect of service level is only partly supported by the data.This study has important implications for software platform dominant enterprises to solve the problems(e.g. the openness choice, homogeneous competition of the third party developers) in opening the platform, to promote open innovation and to improve enterprise performance.