 the interviews, (July 2008), the 3G licenses had not been issued, but this was scheduled to happen in few months. The changes on the Chinese telecom market are radical to such an extent that the past practices have to be changed, if not abandoned. Our view is that the operators are forced to buy more knowledge and software from outside, especially from those Insights from Operator Interviews companies that have experience in running simultaneously 2G and 3G mobile networks and fixed and mobile networks. All in all, in the overall development, the telecommunications industry seems to be following the general pattern of software market evolution within a specific industry. This is confirmed by past developments indicated by the interviewed CSPs: they have legacy software systems developed in-house still in production. Also, some of them have spinned off their software development to an independent company that thereafter can develop and offer OSS/BSS software for a broader range of customers. Another way is to move that development to a daughter company. With the European operators, the pattern of the general model of software market evolution seems to be accompanied with slight differences between differ- ent company size categories. Smaller operators, due to their limited resources, have outsourced almost all software development and rely on external vendors also in further process automation and enhancement. The middle sized CSPs hold on to some software development, and are willing to own the software designs of new applications developed to create some novel types of services. However, they seem to have no plans to include some software offering in their business portfolio. Software design in-house is for them a means for remaining competitive with some possible new services offering, which they attempt to design themselves, and retain the IPRs for the related software. In Asia, the situation is different in mainland China compared to Taiwan, Taiwa- nese operators being of a similar size as the middle categor