...Management of Apple Inc. GB520 Strategic Human Resources Management Professor Andrew Klein May 7, 2013 Strategic Management “Strategic management refers to the art of planning your business at the highest possible level” (What is strategic, 2011). A great example of strategic management is the story of Apple, Inc., formally known as Apple Computers. This story is innovative, includes traditional business strategies, an amazing record in leading change and unplanned successes. Steve Jobs, one of Apple’s founders, made the companies mission to be, “to bring an easy-to-use computer to the market” (Yoffie, 2008). When Apple went public in late 1980 the company immediately took on a new objective – to make the stockholders money. The company had several entrusted members that had different managerial strategies that were used to accomplish the objectives. Since the company was founded it has maintained a strategy of continuous innovation in product and application development. In the beginning Apple’s products were easy to use, revolutionary and profitable; however they struggled due to the lack of alliances with other industries. In the early 90’s Apple began reaching out to other industries to establish alliances and that proved to be a strategic move in order to ensure Apple achieved the company’s original mission as well as meet the stockholders demand of making money. Apple’s Leadership Steve Jobs along side of Steve Wozniak founded Apple Computers when they...
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...Case Analysis 1 - Apple Computer: Research how Apple managed to reinvent itself over the years. 1. What were some of Apple's biggest successes and failures? Describe why. If we Google Apple word you will find a lot of success and amazing story about Apple, Apple products changes the map of computer technology to the how computer functions , by innovate GUI that making computer environment and computer work more friendly and easy to understood by all and help the world to be more digitalize , Apple gain access from meshing the application and adopted to be function on Apple Macintosh computer, All Apple innovations that change the computer from hard to understand low level code (DOS) to GUI an with user friendly “mouse” another Apple innovation. that change the view to the Applications and open the door to the developer to be more creative and more telnet, Apple company one of the first computer hardware company that changing all the time to adopt market requirement and find solutions to match new market behavior. If we want to find more of Apple’s biggest success I can list some of Apple’s main products that I mentions was changing the world view to that type of Product: Apple IPhone: When Apple announce IPhone, Apple’s make IPhone one of the biggest success in the industry of mobile Phone especially that time Nokia was the biggest mobile market sharing with Motorola; Apple IPhone product came with innovations hardware design and OS with fancy background and icons...
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...Paige Davila November 2 2011 Mangagment 3401 Dr.Christy Corey The Apple Team The formal team I have chosen to analyze is Apple. Apple was officially started on April 1, 1976, with the release of the Apple I. The Apple team creates electronics, computer software, and commercial servers. Featured products consist of the iPad, iPhone, iPod music player, and the Macintosh computer. With Apple being the largest company is the world, weighing in at a net worth of 72.1 billion dollars, you can imagine the type of management team that keeps this company on top. According to Apple, “We’re perfectionists. Idealists. Inventors. Forever tinkering with products and processes, always on the lookout for better. A job at Apple is one that requires a lot of you, but it’s also one that rewards bright, original thinking and hard work. None of us here at Apple would have it any other way.” Apple considers themselves perfectionists. Meaning that they work on one project until they have it just right. They have extremely strict deadlines that they absolutely must meet. Apple would rather scratch a product than release it early and not fully completed. Apples management style is about as simple as it can get. When it comes to making any final decisions, everything goes through one man, Steve Jobs. According to some people, Jobs is considered the “anti-Gates”. One of Job’s main personality qualities is perfectionism. For example, the development of the Macintosh took over three years, because...
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...company, Apple is famous for making the first PC, or personal computer. Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24th, 1955 in San Francisco, California. He was adopted by a couple named Paul and Clara Jobs. Growing up in Silicon Valley, Steve showed in computer technology. In 1969, Steve met a computer genius named Stephen Wozniak. Wozniak was a couple of years older than Steve but they’re friendship was able to grow on the foundation of their shared love for electronics. After Steve finished high school, he made plans to go to Reed College in Oregon, which was very expensive and out of his parents’ price range. They wanted to keep their promise to his biological mother that Steve would go to college so they spent their life savings to send him off to Oregon anyway. He completed a semester at Reed and then dropped out. He then began to learn about Easter mysticism and took up strange diets and fasting. Soon after this, he traveled to India to seek insight. He came back from India and he and Wozniak started working on a computer board. They were a part of a group called Homebrew Computer Club. Steve decided that it would be a good idea to sell the computer board to people in the club and start a company and name it Apple. The reason that they decided to name it Apple was because of Steve’s strange diet and lifestyle that he suddenly adopted. In the first year of business, the workshop for the computer boards was in Steve’s garage. They took these computer boards to computer stores...
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...predictable .Steve Jobs was given for adoption after birth, he dropped out of college after one semester, and at the age of twenty-one , he created Apple in his parent’s garage with his friend Steve Wozniak. Quickly rising to the top of the industry, Jobs pushed all boundaries and cultivated what became the intrinsic hallmark of his genius-his perfectionism, taste and design style. But soon after success, Jobs was fired from the top spot of his own company . Finding himself a beginner again , Jobs entered into one of the most creative periods of his life. Through Pixar, the iPod and the iPhone , Jobs revolutionized the major industries of movies, music and phones. The father of four would be repeatedly compared with the inventor Thomas Edison and auto magnate Henry Ford. People described him with the strongest words: Visionary. Showman. Artist. Tyrant. Genius. Jerk. Your time is limited so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. STEVEN PAUL “STEVE” JOBS was adopted at birth by Paul Reinhold Jobs and Clara Jobs. Jobs was taught how to work on electronics in the family garage , how to take apart and rebuild electronics such as radio and television. As a result he became interested in and developed a hobby of technical tinkering. In the late 1973 Jobs took a job as technician in Atari Inc.( a video game and home computer company).Steve Wozniak ( introduced by a neighbor of Jobs) designed a low-cost digital “blue box” which Jobs decided to sell . The sales of...
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...COMMERCE APPLE INC. APPLE INC. formerly Apple Computer, Inc., is a multinational corporation that creates consumer electronics, computer software, and commercial servers Under the supervision of: Sameer Velankar Index Serial No. Particulars Page No. 1. Introduction 2. History 3 Management Board Steve Jobs 4. Apple Products 5. Apple’s comeback 6. Small Solutions & Alternatives 7. i Products 8. Acquisitions 9. SWOT Analysis 10. SWOT Analysis Conclusion & Recommendation 11. Strategic Management the Steve Jobs Way 12. PORTER’S Five Forces 13. Microsoft, Apple & Google 14. Fundamental Analysis 15. Financial History 16. Graph Analysis 17. Case Study: Apple’s lawsuit on Samsung, what happened? 18. The components of the lawsuit 19. Bibliography Apple Computer, Inc. The idea fell from a tree, literally. Steve Jobs had returned from visiting a commune like place in Oregon located in an apple or hard. Apple co-founder and jobs pals, Steve Wozniak ,picked him up from the airport. On the drive home, Jobs simply said “ I came up with a name for our company- Apple”. Wozniak said they could have tried to come up with more technical sounding names but their vision was to make computers approachable. Apple fits perfectly. INTRODUCTION APPLE INC.. , formerly Apple Computer, Inc., is a multinational corporation that creates consumer electronics, computer software...
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...In the early 1980’s computers were unknown. The only real computers were called mainframe computers and they took up an entire room in size. They used a special code called binary that only worked with 1’s and O’s. All of the data had to be inputted by stretches of tape or by flipping switches. It took people to develop a computer language for the computer to take off. The first language was called Cobal and it was followed by Fortran and Basic. Because of the large size of computers, having one would require having space big enough to house a room size machine. It took a company named Intel and its founder Gordon Moore, to develop a microprocessor, which shrunk down the size of the processor by placing millions of transistors on a single chip. Now computers instead of taking up an entire room could now fit on a desk. After this discovery people wanted to make a computer the average person could afford. Ed Roberts the owner of a computer calculator company called MITS was the architect of this endeavor. He came up with the first P.C. and called it Altair. It was designed as a kit that the buyer had to put together. As with anything, if you did not put it together properly it would not work. After the introduction of Altair other people wanted to make computers as well. People such as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and because of all of these “nerds” they help fuel the economic boom of the 1980’s and changed how businesses ran companies. The first P.C Altair was a large box...
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...Visual Identity: The Evolution of the Apple Logo I can remember it vividly – a small rainbow-colored logo that looked like a partially eaten apple affixed to the computer I was using in my sixth grade computer class. The year was 1988, at the beginning of the personal computer age. Since that time, I have associated that logo with everything gadget related. Not realizing at the time how recognizable that little logo would become, Apple, Inc. has joined the ranks of companies like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola in designing the most memorable logos of our time. The Apple company was co-founded by Ronald Wayne in 1976, and the first Apple logo was designed (Klara, 2011). The first logo “resembled a Jethro Tull album cover – a woodcut of Sir Isaac Newton, with an apple dangling over his head and the tagline: ‘A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought….alone’” (Klara, 2011). Co-founder Steve Jobs felt the logo was too outdated and hired Rob Janoff to design a new logo in 1977 (Klara, 2011). Janoff created the famous partially-eaten ‘rainbow apple’, which remained the Apple logo for 22 years (Klara, 2011). In 1998, the millennial apple was unveiled and it remains the current logo (Klara, 2011). The basic design of the logo is quite simple, and Apple, Inc. is one of the only companies in the world that does not use the company name in the logo. Some speculate that the basic concept of the logo, initially, was to pay homage to Sir Isaac Newton and his brilliant...
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...so strongly associated with the basic, commonplace components of software and hardware design that he helped to pioneer and that computer users the world over take for granted, the charismatic, passionately counterculture chief executive officer of Apple Computer was once the most important individual in Silicon Valley and even today dictates the trends and, some would say, overall health of the industry, continuing to drive innovation. Steven Paul Jobs was born an orphan on February 24, 1955 in Los Altos, California. Steve Jobs was adopted from infancy by a Northern California machinist named Paul Jobs and an accountant Clara Jobs, both now deceased. Being mostly a typical boy Steve did well in school with no disciplinary problems to speak of. He was a person that was not easy to get to know, he guarded himself carefully, which is something he still does today. His girlfriend from Homestead High School in Cupertino California remembered him saying, ?Someday I will be a millionaire? in a completely serious manner. Steve would talk about the future a lot and was usually involved in some form of a crusade over one thing or another. Steve?s obsessive personality meshed quite well with his best friend Steve Wozniak whom he called ?Woz.? Steve Wozniak was a brilliant engineer and is responsible for some amazingly complex circuitry designs for computers. Woz was a prankster and a happy go lucky guy where as Steve Jobs was a motivator and usually serious. The two Steve?s were great...
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...told the story of the life of Steve Jobs – Apple’s founder and CEO. Written in chronological order, readers get to have a close look at Jobs’ life, from the little boy tinkering with electronic components in his parents’ garage to the man in charge of changing the face of computing in the 21st century. Originally given up by his birth parents, Jobs was blessed to have come to the loving and supportive family of Paul and Clara Jobs. Jobs emphasizes, time after time, that only they are truly his parents. His childhood is spent working with semi-conductors and electrical parts as California’s Mountainview neighborhood – later on known as Silicon Valley – is the starting point of the newly immersed technology wave. From an early age, Jobs has showed himself to be determined to get what he wants, one example is by directly calling Bill Hewlett – cofounder of Hewlett and Packard – to ask for a component part needed to build his frequency counter. The Valley is also the place that witness the materialization of the fateful friendship between Jobs and Wozniak. At college age, Jobs develops an interest in zen and enrolls in Reed College - a liberal art university in Oregon. This period refines Jobs’ inner awareness and shapes his disposition to be the facilitator of technology and art, therefore sets him apart from competitors down the road. The idea for Apple Computer budded from Wozniak’ meetings with Homebrew Computer Club – a group of hobbyists that are passionate about computers – that...
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...Nationality | American | Alma mater | Reed College (dropped out in 1972) | Occupation | Chairman, Apple Inc. | Salary | US$1[3][4][5][6] | Net worth | $8.3 billion (2011)[7] | Board member of | The Walt Disney Company,[8] Apple, Inc. | Religion | Buddhism[9] | Spouse | Laurene Powell (1991–present) | Children | 4 | Relatives | Mona Simpson | Signature | | Website | Steve Jobs | Steven Paul "Steve" Jobs (born February 24, 1955) is an American business magnate and inventor. He is co-founder,[10] chairman, and former chief executive officer of Apple Inc.[11][12] Jobs also previously served as chief executive of Pixar Animation Studios; he became a member of the board of directors of The Walt Disney Company in 2006, following the acquisition of Pixar by Disney. He was credited in the 1995 film Toy Story as an executive producer.[13] In the late 1970s, Jobs, with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Mike Markkula,[10] and others, designed, developed, and marketed one of the first commercially successful lines of personal computers, the Apple II series. In the early 1980s, Jobs was among the first to see the commercial potential of Xerox PARC's mouse-driven graphical user interface, which led to the creation of the Macintosh.[14][15] After losing a power struggle with the board of directors in 1985,[16][17] Jobs resigned from Apple and founded NeXT, a computer platform development company specializing in the higher-education and business markets. Apple's subsequent...
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...colleagues, competitors and even with people who had ill experiences with Jobs. He was given exclusive and unprecedented access by Jobs to write the biography. This book is about a person; who was a great thinker, innovator and a genius entrepreneur who touched and changed the world of technology, music & animation industry, and computers & mobile phones industry. And yet he was human; he was controlling, manipulative, and had his share of failures and successes. Steve Jobs was adopted by Paul and Clara jobs. They lived in Palo Alto, San Francisco at the time when Silicon Valley was flourishing. His parents were open about his adoption to him from an early age and always told him that they picked him because he was special and different. Though he felt abandoned by his birth parents; he always knew he was special and a chosen one. Paul Jobs who was an automobile technician introduced his son to the world of design and engineering. His knack for making things look simple, neat and beautiful; even the part of the craft or tinkered part of a car which was not visible from the outside had highly influenced Steve in becoming a perfectionist which we see in all the Apple products today. Steve was no doubt an intelligent child with higher IQ for his age at pre-school because of which he was often bored in his class and always found himself in trouble for playing pranks. His parents and teachers agreed on skipping one grade to keep him interested at school. When he was in high school...
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...1. Apple was trying to persuade their audience to purchase one of their brand new Macintosh computers. The commercial’s purpose was to use different sci-fi references and humor to persuade the audience to purchase the Macintosh computers. Apples sci-fi embedded tone makes the audience feel like Macintosh is something of the future. This makes the audience want to purchase of for themselves. Humor is also used to persuade the audience to purchase one of these computers. The pun of technology will destroy mankind is used in a commercial selling technology lightens the mood. This turns it in to a more playful kind of tone to end the commercial for the audience. 2. Apple mainly focused on the audience’s sense of ethos. The commercial was founded...
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...recreating the corporate image and vision and utilizing strategic management to sustain competitive edge. Apple, Inc. is just one example of a company that constantly readdressed its strategic vision and image. During the 1990s, Apple suffered from its multiple changes in executive management and inconsistent strategies. Under Steve Jobs’s leadership, Apple’s vision was to be a continuous pioneer in the PC industry in order to become “an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products...a company that will stand for something a generation or two from now” (Katzenbach, 2012, para. 5). Unlike previous CEOs and much of the competition, Jobs continually strived to keep Apple innovative and exert cultural influence. However, this focus on innovation has forced Apple to continually adapt and offer new products to maintain a marginal advantage in an rigorously competitive industry. The 1990s In the early 1990s, Apple Computer was well received and uniquely valued by PC consumers. This enabled Apple to offer its products at premium prices. However, senior management realized that creating products valued as unique was not enough to sustain profitability. As IBM, its major competitor, dropped prices, Apple needed to alter its business strategy by offering “products and prices designed to regain market share” (Yoffie & Slind, 2008, p. 3). Apple Computer then went through numerous changes in corporate leadership, employed strategies to sustain profits including...
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...The Pirates of Silicon valley The film opens with the creation of the 1984 commercial for Apple Computer, which introduced the first Macintosh. Steve Jobs (Noah Wyle) is speaking with director Ridley Scott (J. G. Hertzler), trying to convey his idea that "We're creating a completely new consciousness." Scott, however, is more concerned at the moment with the technical aspects of the commercial. The film then flashes forward to 1997 as Jobs, who has returned to Apple, is announcing a new deal with Microsoft at the 1997 Macworld Expo. His partner, Steve Wozniak (Joey Slotnick), is introduced as one of the two central narrators of the story. Wozniak notes to the audience the resemblance between "Big Brother" and the image of Bill Gates (Anthony Hall) on the screen behind Jobs during this announcement. Asking how they "got from there to here," the film turns to flashbacks of his youth with Jobs, prior to the forming of Apple. The earliest flashback is in 1971 and takes place on the U.C. Berkeley campus during the period of the student anti-war movements. Jobs and Wozniak are shown caught on the campus during a riot between students and police. They flee and after finding safety, Jobs states to Wozniak, "Those guys think they're revolutionaries. They're not revolutionaries, we are." Wozniak then comments that "Steve was never like you or me. He always saw things differently. Even when I was in Berkeley, I would see something and just see kilobytes or circuit boards while he'd see...
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