The purpose of this chapter is to investigate a hybrid organizational form—open source projects with substantial corporate support and staffing. I begin by asking why corporations would find it in their interest to use and modify open source code and why they might then contribute code back to...

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze open source software development projects as a form of organization responsive to the requirements and rewards of software as a technology. Open source development is a collaborative method of designing software (and other complex artifacts)...

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze software development as a technology, that is, a process that utilizes phenomena in the material world to achieve a human purpose. What tasks are needed to make a software program? How does software development compare to the other technologies we have...

The purpose of this book is to present a theory of technical systems that can help us better understand the demands technology places on organizations. New technologies in general require new patterns of activity and reward some patterns over others. Quoting Brian Arthur:"When a novel technology...

Spurred by the success of the IBM PC, in the early 1980s, a new form of organization—the digital platform ecosystem—became common in all industries that used digital technology. Digital platform ecosystems were vertically distintegrated organizations, characterized by distributed governance,...

Moore’s Law is the prediction that transistor densities of semiconductor chips will double, speeds double, and prices drop by half approximately every eighteen months to two years. The Law lies at the heart of the high rates of technical change observed in the computer, communication and...

The purpose of this chapter is to explore variation among organizations employing mass production technology. To allow for an apples-to-apples comparison, I examine organizations using essentially the same technologies, making similar products, and competing in the same markets. Specifically, I...

The purpose of this chapter is to explain how and why Google used an open source operating system, Android, to attract handset makers and application developers into a new ecosystem for mobile devices. The chapter begins by describing Google’s initial investment in the open source operating...

The purpose of this chapter is to use value structure analysis to better understand how sponsors of digital exchange platforms capture value and maintain strategic bottlenecks. I begin by describing the three core technological processes that lie at the heart of all digital exchange platforms:...

As digital technology evolved under the impetus of Moore’s Law, a group of new “exchange” platforms emerged that focused on facilitating transactions and/or communications between different parties. Exchange platforms are characterized by having “sides”. The simplest have two sides:...