We are excited to announce that Professor Dr. Thomas Huber, an Associate Professor at ESSEC Business School in France, will be visiting Freie Universität on 3rd of July 2025. During his stay, he will share insights from his research with a focus on the topic “Counter-Orchestration in Platform Ecosystems: How Complementors Forced Apple into Changing Platform Rules”. Students are invited to attend his research talk and may also schedule 1:1 Sessions for personalized guidance on research questions.

When: Thursday, July 3rd 2025, 12:00 – 13:00

Where: Garystr. 35 (Henry-Ford-Bau) Konferenzraum II

Title: “Counter-Orchestration in Platform Ecosystems: How Complementors Forced Apple into Changing Platform Rules”

Authors: Thomas HUBER, Thomas KUDE, Jan LEPOUTRE, Julien MALAURENT

Platform owners with substantial market power can use platform rules to impose unfavorable terms on complementors and restrict typical market-based strategies for circumventing those terms. Yet, while complementors may have limited recourse against unfavorable terms in the market domain, platform owners also operate within broader social and political contexts, rendering them vulnerable to non-market challenges—ranging from public advocacy campaigns to regulatory interventions. Therefore, this study explores how complementors can leverage non-market strategies to instigate platform rule changes in their favor.

Drawing on a historical analysis of Apple’s iOS ecosystem from 2009 to 2024, we reconstruct how complementors used non-market strategies to pressure Apple into changing key rules. From our extensive body of primary and secondary source material, we develop a process model of complementor-driven platform rule change that highlights the pivotal role of large, influential complementors—referred to as “complementor giants”—in orchestrating these changes.

Specifically, the model identifies three interlinked mechanisms (Collective Action Cycle, Exposure Cycle, Long-term Accumulation Cycle) that unpack how these giants, by deliberately designing and timing their non-market attacks, spark reinforcing responses from ecosystem participants (complementors and users), external stakeholders (regulators and media), and the platform owner, thereby, creating mounting pressure for rule change.

By offering a process-based explanation of complementor-driven rule change, the model moves the platform governance conversation from (1) platform owner-led orchestration to counter-orchestration by complementor giants and (2) from adapting to owner-set rules to instigating rule change against the owner’s will. We moreover contribute to the wider non-market strategy literature by showing how the effectiveness of these approaches is closely tied to the structural tensions inherent in such ecosystems.

Bio

Thomas L. Huber (PhD, University of Bern) is an Associate Professor of Information Systems at ESSEC Business School, where he conducts research and teaches at the intersection of technology and management. He is a process-oriented researcher focused on understanding and theorizing change processes in modern technology creation. Specifically, he examines the dynamics of governance and control in contexts like IS outsourcing and platform ecosystems. His work has been published in Information Systems Research (ISR), Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS), European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS), and Information Systems Journal (ISJ).