Platform Ecosystem Collapse Mechanism And Avoidance Strategy

In the era of the Internet,the platform ecosystem has gradually become a new paradigm for industry innovation.Platform ecosystem refers to the business ecosystem composed of users from both sides of resource supply and demand and a series of closely related enterprises and organizations,including complementary service providers,with the platform Internet enterprises as the core.Leaders of global Internet companies such as Baidu in search engine,Tencent in instant messaging and Alibaba in e-commerce are typical representatives.It is of great theoretical and practical significance to master the operating laws of the platform ecosystem and discuss the management strategies of platform enterprises.The academic community generally agrees with the core mechanism of the positive feedback effect of the platform system network,that is,gaining first-mover advantage or even achieving winner-take-all based on the increasing effect of user scale returns.However,existing research cannot explain the collapse of unicorn companies such as the Netscape browser,the blackberry smartphone and 263 websites.In addition,Yayan Consulting pointed out in the industry report that in the past 20 years,the average life expectancy of Internet platform companies was only 4.9 years.Previous research has generally focused on the evolution path of successful platforms,but little attention has been paid to the industry practice of the collapse of platform companies.This phenomenon is not uncommon,and it is difficult to provide a theoretical basis for platform enterprise managers to cultivate the awareness of early warning and prevention of enterprise collapse.In this context,in order to dig deeper into the evolution model and collapse mechanism of platform Internet companies,it is necessary to construct a dynamic evolution model suitable for revealing the scale of platform Internet users,clarify the influence mechanism of major driving factors on the evolution of the platform system,and develop a platform ecosystem collapse evasion strategy.Based on the principle of ecosystem reciprocity network and its object applicability,this paper reveals the collapse phenomenon and conditions of the platform system by constructing a dynamic evolution model of the platform ecosystem user scale,which not only broadens the theoretical research scope of the platform field and expands the classic critical mass and positive feedback theory,but also lays the foundation for the research framework of platform ecosystem evasion and avoidance.At the same time,the influence mechanism of endogenous growth rate,unilateral network effects and cross-side network effects and their combination on the collapse of platform ecosystem is expounded theoretically,which can help platform managers to deepen the understanding of the platform system's collapse process and the results of the collapse.Finally,on the basis of the above research,a framework for formulating a platform ecosystem failure avoidance strategy is proposed.Taking the platform pricing control strategy as an example,the user pricing dynamics model is embedded in the user's supply and demand side of the user scale to clarify the impact of platform pricing on the system's failure.The calculating example is used to demonstrate the system's collapse avoidance strategy to develop a thinking framework applications.Through the research on the platform ecosystem's collapse mechanism and avoidance strategy,the following conclusions are obtained:(1)There is a systematic collapse phenomenon in platform enterprises,which needs to attract the attention of platform managers.Just as the results of a special survey of Fortune 500 CEOs by researchers show,80% of the respondents believe that the face of crisis in modern enterprises is as inevitable as the death of human beings.Its essence is the triggering of the system's collapse condition under the combined action of the main driving factor parameters of the platform development.(2)The endogenous growth rate of the platform,the strength of the unilateral network effects,and the strength of the cross-side network effects are important driving factors for the evolution of the platform ecosystem,which affect the system's failure from both the process and the result.(3)Based on the development characteristics and rules of the platform itself,platform enterprise operation managers and researchers can appropriately expand and modify the basic model to obtain the collapse avoidance strategy,which can adjust and optimize the user scale of the platform.For example,price regulation can scientifically avoid the platform ecosystem failure risk and minimized corporate losses.