Classroom Companion: Business

4.4 · Computer Infrastructure and Platforms as Ecosystem Components

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4.5 
 Applications and Content as Ecosystem Component
The number of applications available to customers is enormous, in particular, after 
the smartphone entered the market in 2012. The number of available apps in 
Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store were about 3.0 million and 3.4 million, 
respectively, by the end of 2020 (Number of available apps in the Apple App Store 
from December 2020. Statista. December 10, 2020; Number of available applica-
tions in the Google Play Store from December 2009 to September 2020. Statista, 
December 10, 2020).
Some digital products are produced and sold by a single ASP only involving the 
ISPs for transporting the information to the customers. The biggest companies in 
the digital business, e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google, are conglomer-
ates consisting of several subsidiaries providing most of the content associated 
with the company. They also run their own computer platform, and some of them 
even offer ISP services and cloud computing.
Services may also be complex, involving not only an ASP but also several con-
tent providers and platform providers. One example is newspapers. A newspaper 
may buy or receive free information from other newspapers or magazines and 
engage freelance journalists or photographers. The newspaper is also member of a 
web of text and video content providers, news agencies, and stock photography 
agencies.
4.6 
 Consumers as Ecosystem Component
The consumers of digital service providers may be companies, organizations, or 
individuals. Examples of companies acting as consumers are electric power provid-
ers receiving automatic consumption measurements form censor platforms and 
newspapers buying pictures, news, and other topics from content providers.
The consumers in digital markets play an essential role in the digital economy 
not only as consumers of digital goods but also as a source of feedback to design-
ers and providers of the goods that may be used to improve the product. The 
importance of market feedback is emphasized in 
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Chap. 
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. Closely related to 
market adoption is the effort by the authorities to regulate both the digital product 
and the marketing of it.
Consumer adoption (or user adoption) of information and communication 
technologies and digital services is a key element to apprehend the creation of 
dependencies in the digital economy ecosystem. Consumer adoption is a measure 
of how and at what rate consumers are adopting a specific digital service. Some 
aspects concerning consumer adoption rate can be summarized as follows:
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Obviously, the technology or digital service must be adopted by some initial 
consumers to have any impact on the market evolution. If there are too few 
initial consumers, then evolution may stagnate, and the technology or service 
may disappear from the market. Examples of this are videophones only enhanc-
ing ordinary telephony by showing videos of the speakers while talking and the