Technical Innovations - (Re)Shaping the Mobile Sector : The Breaker, the Trojan and… the Shopping Malls

In the recent years, the mobile industry has experienced important changes in its very structure shifting from an operator-centric model to a burgeoning business ecosystem (ANDERSON & WILLIAMS, 2004; BASOLE, 2009; BASOLE & ROUSE, 2009; GUEGUEN & ISCKIA, 2008) made of various players including mobile operating system (OS) providers, software vendors, independent developers, device manufacturers and operators (MNOs and MVNOs). Even if some of these players share the same vision of what will be the future of the mobile Internet their strategic agendas are not yet aligned and most of them consider they have more to lose than to gain through cooperation. For instance, most OS providers claim to support open standards but they have all launched their own OS to differentiate themselves which increases competition. This has resulted in a jungle of OS making innovation even more risky - but still absolutely essential - for the other players and finally decreasing the efficiency of the whole business