Special Issue on Business Models for Mobile Platforms: Guest Editors’ Introduction

Abstract

The impact of the convergence of mobile and internet technologies and products on the structure of the mobile industry, and in particular on the position of mobile network operators as integrated service providers has been a subject of continuous debate between proponents of 'open' versus defenders of 'integrated' business models. Increasingly, however, it has become apparent that, instead of relying on any outright 'open' or 'closed' strategy, successful mobile ICT companies employ 'open but not fully open' platform strategies in order to combine advantages of diversity and complementarities with advantages of control and coordination (see e.g. [1]-[3]). This has opened the door to a much more in-depth analysis of multi-actor and multi-sided mobile platforms, that moves beyond superficial dichotomies and explains the current dynamics in a more realistic manner. Mobile platforms may refer to various system levels, including mobile devices' operating systems, mobile network protocols, mobile services and applications, and so on. Through platform ownership, companies aspire to position themselves as central gatekeepers in the mobile industry. This evolution presents a range of new possibilities to create and capture value in new and unexpected ways. At the same time, it challenges the traditionally dominant stakeholders active in the mobile industry, and has led analysts to anticipate a reconfiguration of the entire mobile industry architecture. Service and content providers have to consider how to decide how to deal with the multiple available platforms. While some service providers see mobile platforms as a mean to control the market, others consider them to be yet another channel. Moreover privacy concerns for users are becoming more of an issue. In the wake of a buoyant and turbulent year for mobile service platforms, this special issue focuses on the causes and effects of the current explosion of platforms in the mobile ICT industry. The objective of this issue is to explore changing business models and industry architectures as a result of the introduction of mobile platforms. The issue contains original papers on this central topic that discuss characteristics of successful business models in this field, the emergence of new architectures, new mobile eco-systems, and the competition and collaboration between media, IT, internet and telecommunications companies. It focuses on individual platforms and applications, as well as on cross-platform comparative studies and takes into account technological issues, value creation in multi-actor settings and governance of new mobile ecosystems. The papers collected here include different perspectives, ranging from techno-economics to marketing and from engineering to social applications. Neelakanta and Yassin discuss co-evolution of technologies and competitor behaviour from the perspective of a biological ecosystem, and at the same time, try to mathematically model the techno-economic behaviour of competitors in the mobile market in terms of prey and predator. Their analysis focuses on the iPhone, Android and Symbian platforms, referring to traffic shares in the US market as data. The relevance of their approach is to show that market development can be analyzed as a complex adaptive system, and that (d) evolution of markets follow a non-linear path. They mainly compare the iPhone with Symbian, and Android with Symbian platform in an ex-post manner. It can be argued that in addition, an ex-ante analysis of the competition between iPhone and Android is also highly desirable. Moreover, in light of the recent strategic choice of Nokia and Microsoft to collaborate closely on mobile platforms, it appears to be interesting to test the predictive validity of their model in future research. Campbell and Faheem Ahmed study the mobile Operating System ecosystems from the perspective of the software engineering industry and specifically focus on the role of business processes. …