A Resource-Based Explanation for the Apache Consistent Dominance in the Web-Server Industry

Informações

Código: ESO1075
Divisão: ESO - Estratégia em Organizações
Tema de Interesse: ESO-A - Estratégia em Organizações

Autores

Carlos Santos Jr., Marcio Augusto Goncalves

Resumo

Open source communities such as Linux and Apache became well knownfor providing high-quality software at free acquisition cost. Because of that, they havebeen widely adopted by many organizations. As a matter of fact, Apache has dominatedits market in terms of share for 13 years now, competing with corporations as big asMicrosoft. The resource-based view (RBV) of firms posits that for an organization tooutperform its competitors (as Apache has done consistently), it must have resource(s) (1)valuable, (2) rare, (3) imperfectly inimitable, and (4) non-substitutable. Accordingly, onemay conclude that Apache is an organization holder of such resource(s), which areApache’s source for sustainable competitive advantage. Our current available literaturedoes not explain specifically what those open source organizations resources might be.This paper is effort in that direction. We ask, “How can an open-source softwareorganization outperform its for-profit research-oriented competitors?” To answer thisquestion, we develop three propositions based on the RBV. We demonstrate how each ofthese propositions are found in the web-server industry case and propose methods fortheir empirical evaluation. Future research directions are also provided.

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