Strategic management: Apple

Extract

[...] That's certainly one of the most important core competencies of the firm (we can see it with the success of the iPod, mainly based on its design). - Image and Marketing: By creating the apple stores, high places of promotion of the brand and created with a design concept allying technological accents and sobriety, the apple shops create tendency and contribute to the identity of the brand. Furthermore, they daily attract numerous customers, of whom a majority are users of Windows who are not aware that an alternative is possible. [...]

[...] And we're always trying to do better” Steve Jobs is more than a manager in Apple. According to Sir Harvey Jones (1988) who says that for a good management and leadership, a leader is better than a manager, Steve Jobs support its decisions and strategy by using its popularity: he has been elected one of the seventeenth “people who mattered in 2004” in the traditional special edition of the Time (http://www.time.com/time/personoftheyear/2004/people/14.html). Steve Jobs has humility too: “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. [...]

[...] For the innovation: “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower”, turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines” For the design: most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service”; “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” For the image: think we're having fun. I think our customers really like our products. [...]

[...] This led to a long judicial battle between Apple and Microsoft. The result of the judgment allowed Microsoft to copy elements of the graphic interface of Macintosh. It is then that, by studying the system of the IBM PC, many firms were able to make Compatible IBM PC. Despite the first version of Windows being technologically inferior to Macintosh, a clone PC could be sold cheaper. It is the reason for which, due to the nature opened with the platform PC, there were always more available software packages for Windows. [...]

[...] The two main ones in that case are the environment and the technology. During these ten last years with the development of internet, people began to change their way of consuming music. The Compact Disc began to loose its supremacy, the MP3 changed the uses. The technology changed too: because of this evolution to the immaterial music, the products to listen to music have to become adapted. The MP3 player appeared in different types: light and small with flash memory, heavier but with more capacity for the hard disk. [...]