The dominance of the IT industry in a converging ICT ecosystem

The aim of the paper is to examine the increasing dominance of IT companies in the converging ICT industry and, on the basis of this development, to contribute to extending the theoretical understanding of market and industry convergence in the ICT area. The term convergence is often used, but relatively little theory concerning convergence has been developed except for the basic differentiation between convergence based on substitution and convergence based on complementation.
The framework proposed in the paper is a combination of the complementation/substitution framework with the structuralist concept of articulation used on modes of operation of companies from different parts of the ICT industries and the resource based view on companies extended to a sector perspective and the path dependent developments of the IT, telecoms, and media sectors.
Two kinds of empirical evidence are examined in order to discuss the emerging relations of dominance in the ICT area. First, there is a comparison of the basic technological properties of Internet communications and telecoms. Furthermore, there are two cases: One on the smartphone market and one on OTT TV. The two cases have an exemplary character illustrating the increasing dominance of the IT area in relation to telecoms and broadcasting, respectively.