Are the digital platforms that we know here to stay? Both empirical insights and theoretical works suggest digital platform stability. Digital platforms such as Airbnb, Netflix and Taobao have experienced tremendous success, and the theoretical works on modularity and multisided markets depict competitive platform landscapes as controlled by a hegemonic platform leader. However, platform history chronicles multiple cases of leadership shifts in platform ecosystems. In this paper, we coin these situations ‘platform overthrows’ and uncover the relevant strategies for both a challenger to conduct a platform overthrow and for a platform leader to resist it. To do so, we conducted an inductive protocol to reinterpret 27 already published cases of platform overthrow attempts. Our results suggest that, during a platform overthrow attempt, both players articulate functional expansion and technical genericity. Accordingly, we formulate propositions that account for the strategies at play during a platform overthrow attempt. We discuss these results regarding the digital platform literature on competition and conclude that the study of platform overthrow can yield useful insights on the future of digital platforms.

中文翻译：

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数字平台的未来：平台被推翻的条件

我们知道这里的数字平台会留下吗？经验性的见解和理论著作都表明了数字平台的稳定性。Airbnb，Netflix和淘宝等数字平台取得了巨大的成功，有关模块化和多面市场的理论著作描绘了由霸权平台领导者控制的竞争性平台格局。但是，平台历史记录了平台生态系统中领导层转移的多种情况。在本文中，我们将这些情况称为“平台推翻”，并揭示了挑战者进行平台推翻和平台领导者进行抵抗的相关策略。为此，我们进行了归纳协议，以重新解释27个已经发布的平台颠覆尝试案例。我们的结果表明，在平台推翻尝试期间，功能扩展和技术共性。因此，我们提出了一个命题，该命题考虑了平台推翻尝试期间正在发挥作用的策略。我们讨论有关竞争的数字平台文献的这些结果，并得出结论，对平台颠覆的研究可以对数字平台的未来产生有用的见解。