It's Hard to Win a Zero-Sum Game

Zero-sum games are hard to win, in part because every winner is balanced by a loser. Many mature mobile communications markets are largely zero-sum games these days. Market share, by definition, means one supplier gains exactly what another supplier loses. 

That is not the case for new, emerging or growing markets, where virtually all contestants can, in theory, gain while nobody loses. 

The substitution of machines for human labor is something of a zero-sum game as well.
The notion of tradeoffs is key for zero-sum markets. Consider minimum wage laws or unionization of employees. The issue is not whether those things are good or bad, but simply the tradeoffs that are made. 

Higher minimum wage laws. produce higher wages for a smaller number of employees, in part because higher wage minimums increase the attractiveness of substituting machines for human labor. 

Higher union membership and bargaining power tends to produce higher wages for union members, but often at the cost of the number of people who are employed at unionized businesses. 

The other trend we see is that when forced to make a choice, unions tend to prefer saving a smaller number of jobs in return for gaining higher wages. Workers with less seniority normally are sacrificed in such deals. 

We can disagree about whether Uber and Lyft drivers are independent contractors or employees. But it is not hard to argue that if employee classification leads to higher minimum wages, it also will lead to fewer Uber and Lyft drivers able to work. 

We can make any choices we want about which outcome we prefer: more work for more people or higher wages for fewer workers. But the choices will inevitably be made. It’s a zero-sum game.

As more and more telecom markets reach saturation, zero-sum outcomes will appear in market share statistics or the number of 4G phone account subscribers versus 5G subscribers.

Mobile operators can bend the curves a bit by changing value propositions, adding new features and bundling devices and features (up to a point) to encourage customers to switch to more-expensive plans, when they come up with compelling offers. But all of that occurs within a business that is largely a zero-sum game in many markets.