Agent-based modelling of software market share evolution: the factors and simulations

Abstract

In the software industry, 'market share' refers to the percentage of the total available market that is being serviced by a software product. Market share analysis and prediction are important components of managing the marketing of a software business. In this paper, we study the software market share from an ecosystem point of view. We hypothesise that the evolution of the market share of a software product is dependent on two types of factors: internal and external. We build an agent-based model to represent the evolution of the software market share and compare the market share observations with the market share simulations of various operating systems, web servers and web browsers. The results show that the agent-based model effectively incorporates various factors of software products' market share and successfully simulates their evolution.