Date of Award

6-2023

Document Type

Union College Only

Department

Computer Science

Second Department

Economics

First Advisor

Ercan Karadas

Second Advisor

John Rieffel

Language

English

Keywords

* Strategic Learning * TTM * AOSP

Abstract

Google's Android Operating System (OS) is open-source software available for public use. Several smartphone manufacturers (Original Equipment Manufacturers or OEMs) like Samsung and LG use and contribute to the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP). These contributions can be tracked using their commits to the AOSP, a public data set. This research will explore the relationship between a firm's or an OEM's contributions to AOSP and marketing a product based on the contribution type and date, which could ultimately contribute to the success of a phone model and the firm. These contributions to AOSP can be in the form of a firm's exploratory and exploitative learning, which can be related to the Time to Market (TTM) of a product, which would be a phone model in this research. I will use the mobile telecom data on Android commits (software contributions) to understand the difference between exploratory and exploitative learning of these Android OEMs. The dataset consists of the complete population of Android commits written by software engineers worldwide between 2008-2022 (approximately 16 million observations), which Prof. Dallas and his colleagues have collected over a period. Because Android is open source, this is free and open for public use. The data set highlights some handset (mobile phone) companies contributing to Android and to which release (different releases of Android), and how quickly they come up with a handset (or phone) after the new version is released that version of the Android OS. I will be re- searching the time and type (exploratory or exploitative) of these contributions and exploring what affects their TTM. This research could potentially lead to discovering strategic management techniques and timed marketing in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry, focusing on firms that use and contribute to the Android OS.

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Rights Statement

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted.