The complementor perspective: examining how Dutch developers and industry professionals navigated Google Assistant as a platform (2018-2021)

This article examines the process of platformization from the perspective of platform complementors. It focusses on Dutch complementors—retailers, news organizations, transportation companies, and software start-ups—that developed Conversational Actions for Google Assistant. The analysis builds on a combination of digital fieldwork and interviews with Dutch developers, conversational specialists, and marketing and communication managers between 2018 and 2021. Pushing back against the dominant focus on successful platforms, we demonstrate that platformization needs to be understood as a balancing act, marked by frictions that arise in attempts to align expectations, interests, concerns, and objectives of different actors. Our findings show that complementors’ imaginaries of a Dutch assistant conflicted with Google’s global priorities, revealing the limits of localization in platform infrastructures. Moreover, we highlight the asymmetry between complementors’ expectation of a linear platform development and Google’s circular strategy of continuous reconfiguration of infrastructures and platforms to capture specific markets.