Post-release IS success: The role of vendor and community behaviors

In an interconnected world with frequent customer-to-customer and customer-firm interactions, post-release product success is increasingly driven by non-transactional consumer behaviors which go beyond the initial purchase. This is especially true in the information systems (IS) industry where the emergence of consumer-focused software ecosystems have drastically lowered switching costs and provided users with tools such as user-driven recommendation systems and online communities to guide their decision making. Consequently, there is considerable value in investigating how software vendors can facilitate the performance of such user behaviors and how the performance of such behaviors affects product success in a competitive market. Drawing on a large archival dataset pertaining to the behavior of more than 2,000 software products and their user communities, this study finds that software vendors can facilitate the performance of extra-role behaviors by engaging in the unilateral provision of resources. Whereas the provision of technical resources is found to generate discussion in the online community which triggers an increase in the number of active user of the product, direct social interaction is shown to affect IS success by generating an increase in the number of positive reviews which in turn attracts new users to the product or service.