Competitive Evolutionary Dynamics of Cloud Service Offerings in Korea: A Path-Dependency Perspective

Cloud service for personal users has become more popular world-wide since Apple Inc. launched iCloud storage service in October, 2011. However, such cloud storage service was not new because many global telecom companies, usually called telcos, as well as many portals had already offered similar Internet-based online storage services at that time. As of now, there can be seen hundreds of diverse cloud storage and computing services for both personal and enterprise users in the global market. During last several years, Korean cloud service market has been led by three major telcos, who have launched more advanced and more diversified services competing with each other. Some questions may arise: What makes that happen and what kind of market dynamics affects on the evolution of cloud service offerings? This paper tries to answer these questions by categorizing and analysing 84 cloud services offered by three major telcos in Korea during last three years. As a research framework, Pessemier’s new product classification scheme was employed and precedence relationships among differently positioned service categories were analyzed to figure out the competitive evolutionary dynamics of the market. From the empirical study, path dependency was observed and resource-based view of the market competition was validated. Also, it was found that a player’s next move in service offering to a better position in Pessemier’s product space is quite closely related with the competitive position as well as the company-owned competitive resources like technology competency and company-wide service scope.