The evolution of mobile industry : modular to integral

This thesis explores the dynamics of the mobile industry in the US. One in every four Americans owns a smart phone. Smart phones are fuelling the growth of the mobile web and an ecosystem of mobile applications. As innovative applications and services capture the marketplace, which factors ensure greater user adoption is essential to building attractive services. Despite innovation in network technology and billions of dollars invested in evolving into newer generations of technology, providing high capacity, low latency and high availability, the mobile network is fast becoming a medium to supply mobile services and is losing the capacity to distinguish itself based on network features. Many are of the opinion that the network itself is getting commoditized. The rapid growth in the mobile industry has led to evolution in the industry value chain. This thesis addresses the following questions: 1) What makes a product/ service on the mobile platform attractive for users to adopt them? 2) What has led to commoditization of mobile network? 3) How has the nature of the industry evolved? By employing systems tools like stakeholder theory, gear model (value chain mapping) and system dynamics, the nature of the mobile industry is studied. Various stakeholders and components in the value chain are identified to understand what their individual needs are and how are they met. The thesis conclusions are supported by conducting research from academic journals, market reports and online journals/ blogs.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Engineering Systems Division.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2011

Author dc:creator

• Nag, Ipshita

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Henry Birdseye Weil.

• Engineering Systems Division.
• System Design and Management Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/67566

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/67566