What business is the mobile phone industry now in? Part two case study

A key issue for any organization in any industry is to ask what business it is in. As was suggested in the first part of this Case Study, Orange moved the focus of its core business from the product, the cell phone, to the customer benefit received, the aspiration for personal communication capability. To understand how fast the basic handset is changing, one has only to watch a sample of the globally successful New York-based TV soap drama Friends. Before the change in fashion is noticed, before the change in consumer electronics in their living rooms and offices catches the eye, the enormous bricks the actors put to their ears to make a phone call shouts: ‘This programme belongs to an earlier age.’ This change in design of the handset is a visible embodiment of the vast changes afoot in the industry; changes that are less perceptible to the eye. The technological advances of mobile telephony have resulted in the mobile phone being an effective point of convergence for three formerly distinct technologies: communications, computing and consumer electronics. This makes demands on the design and production of goods and services in mobile telephony; it also changes the competitive sphere.