Apple is one of the rare companies that continues to find ways to innovate in order to separate
themselves from the competition. Throughout the last decade Apple has exponentially
exploded into one of the most successful companies in the world. Like the case states, they did
this mainly on having a powerful competitive strategy. They found out early, one of the only
ways to stay relevant in an ever growing tech industry you have to continue to innovate and
have the next big thing. From them creating the iPod in 2001 to introducing the iPhone in 2007,
Apple is always using competitive strategy to stay ahead of its competitors.
I believe that Samsung and Google are Apple’s biggest competitors right now. Although, in my
opinion, they are still far away from catching up with Apple, they are starting to innovate on
their own instead of imitating Apple’s products. Throughout the past decade, Apple would come
out with this revolutionary new product and Samsung and Google would imitate the same thing
but put their own spin on it. Now they have focused more on the innovation aspect and are
catching up with Apple.
2. What are the greatest challenges Apple is facing? Detail them by internal weaknesses and
external threats. How can Apple transform internal weaknesses into strengths and external
threats into opportunities?
Since Apple has exponentially grown in the past decade and continued to innovate a plethora of
new products, I believe that they may be running out of things to do to their products. The
iPhone has been a huge success for the company and have tried to recreate that with the Apple
Watch. It has yet to live up to the hype they projected and are looking for new ideas to have the
next big thing. Internal weaknesses, such as not having any more groundbreaking ideas caused
by groupthink could be an issue. Maybe bringing in new minds to think of a huge product could
benefit the company. In class we talked about separate companies all getting into the self
driving cars. Google and Uber have already begun working separately. Some external threats
Apple has to compete with is companies like Samsung or Google creating the next big thing and
have Apple take a backseat. A way to take these threats away tis to join them. I think that by
joining a competitor like Google to make these self driving cars a reality is beneficial to both
companies. Both companies have huge customer following and by bringing them together could
draw two times the profits.
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Case Summary #2
MiniCase 6 - Apple: What’s Next?
1. Explain Apple’s success over the last decade. Think about which industries it has disrupted
and how. Also look at Apple’s main competitors.
