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Free Isn’t Always Better: How Slack Holds Its Own Against Microsoft Teams

What will it take to win the collaboration app wars: massive scale or a loyal following? A case study by David Yoffie digs into the intense competition between Microsoft Teams and Salesforce's Slack.

Delivering a Personalized Shopping Experience with AI

THE YES, a shopping app for fashion brands, uses a sophisticated algorithm to create and deliver a personalized store for every shopper, based on her style preferences, size, and budget. After launching the app in 2020, the founders had to decide whether to continue developing the algorithm to deliver on the company’s customer value proposition or to focus their resources on new customer acquisition, with the idea that more users on the app would improve the algorithm's performance. Senior Lecturer Jill Avery and The YES co-founder and CEO Julie Bornstein discuss this make-or-break dilemma in the case, The YES: Reimagining the Future of e-Commerce with Artificial Intelligence (AI). This episode was recorded live at Harvard Business School on March 30, 2022 as part of our Case Method 100 celebration.

Dog Eat Dog: Measuring Network Effects Using a Digital Platform Merger

With heated debate over antitrust regulation of online platforms, this study finds that when a larger platform acquired its greatest competitor, users were not better off with a single platform compared with two competitors, despite marked efficiency improvements experienced by the acquiring platform.

Racism and Digital Design: How Online Platforms Can Thwart Discrimination

Poor design decisions contribute to racial discrimination on many online platforms. Michael Luca and colleagues offer tips for reducing the risk, used by Airbnb and other companies. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

Platform Systems vs. Step Processes—The Value of Options and the Power of Modularity

Technology shapes organizations through incentives and rewards. This paper compares the value structure of platform systems and step processes, finding that step processes reward technical integration, unified governance, risk aversion, and the use of direct authority. Platform systems by contrast reward modularity, distributed governance, risk taking, and autonomous decision-making.

Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations: Chapter 14 Introducing Open Platforms and Business Ecosystems

Platform systems have existed in various forms for centuries. Beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, newly competitive technology of open platform systems based on digital technology and modular architectures changed the structure of entire industries. This paper lays the groundwork for a comprehensive theoretical investigation of open platform systems.

Explaining the Vertical-to-Horizontal Transition in the Computer Industry

This paper shows how the vertical-to-horizontal transition in the computer industry was an organizational response to a change in economic rewards brought by the competing technologies of rationalized step processes and open platform systems. The spread of modular architectures—and the rapid pace of change in semiconductor technology—shifted the balance of rewards away from predictability toward flexibility.