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1) Historically, what were Apple’s major competitive advantages? * Apple came back with their differentiation strategy. It was supported by a strong promotion campaign, with the goal of to ‘differentiate the Macintosh amid intense competition in the PC industry. Therefore Apple has always been a very innovative manufacturer and for a long time tried to produce a unique product which is easy to use. Apple’s competitive advantages are its control of software and hardware, marketing, digital asset management, retail strategy, product differentiation and Steve Job’s strategically decisions. Decisions such as switching to Intel processor resulted not only reduced power use & design ease but also made Macs able to run windows on it. Apple retails concept implements direct selling, creates first hand experience to customers, customer education, after sales service etc. With these advantages Apple built a barrier to five forces that shapes industry competition. * 2) Analyze the structure of the personal computer industry over the last 10 years. How have the dynamics of the PC industry changed?
The shakeout of the decade-old personal computer industry came earlier than expected. Starting in 1990, a PC price war started to brew. Various companies began to cut prices on their existing product lines and at the same time rolled out lower-priced PC models. At the beginning of the 1990s the structure of the personal computer industry changed dramatically after several decades of relative stability. IBM dominance of the PC industry and its role as coordinator of the “IBM-compatible” standard started to erode in the late 1980s. It attempted to regain control of the PC standard by connecting it to IBM-proprietary technology. The strategy failed. By the early 1990s “IBM-compatible” had been replaced by “Wintel” as the dominant standard with IBM‘s

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