以價值創造與專享觀點探討平台產品之策略

Abstract

The cloud computing market boomed during 2010 with more and more companies adopting cloud services. There's no doubt that cloud computing is one of the biggest buzzwords in the IT industry today. As many giant companies of this world battle for supremacy in the cloud, how can Taiwanese companies take a share of the profits? Taiwanese companies focus on the development of cloud computing. However, they have to understand more about the characteristics of the product before the companies provide cloud computing service platform. In this research, I considered the cloud computing services as a kind of platform services. Firstly, I used three classic cases which are Amazon Cloud Computing IaaS Case, Apple App Store Case and Nintendo Wii Case to figure out how the platform products and services work and what are key characteristics of the products. In the case study, Amazon and Apple successfully expanded their markets through providing the cloud services while Nintendo Wii didn’t sustain its competitive advantage for a long period. The research focuses on value creation and value appropriation. Secondly, I used plenty of theories to support the outcome, such as value net, ecosystem, blue ocean strategy, value appropriation, imitation, substitute, hold-up, and slack. Referring to these three cases, we figured out how these giants conducted their strategies for platform services and products and what kinds of factors determined their fates of success or failure. Finally, I used the case of Chung Hua Telecom (CHT), which has the largest market share of Telecom in Taiwan to discuss how the platform works in Taiwan market. Results showed that it made a lot of efforts to enter cloud computing industry. For example, it improves its equipments and infrastructures. CHT has advantages on its own fixed line and wireless devices. Moreover, it coordinates with Quanta Computer, Microsoft and Trend Micro on IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. However, CHT is still in the earlier stage of development. The big challenge for CHT is how to gain sustainable profit in the industry. CHT should try to attract more application developers to join its platform to develop more applications for end users and create solid ecosystem in cloud industry.