Personal Computer Case Study

1. Kindly conduct an analysis on the evolution of the Industry of Personal Computers.

In the middle of the 70s’ century, the Personal Computer (PC) industry can be divided into two main groups of players: the first one owned more than 50% of the market share and was called “clone markets” because its composed by many local brand that produce PC assembling components by themselves, and their computers was not too much different from the others made by big corporations. The second one was composed by the main companies producing computer, for instance IBM, Dell, HP, Gateway, in a standardize way. In this context Jobs and Wozniak set-up Apple, a new company in the PC market, starting from their own capabilities and resources in the Jobs’ garage,

Many companies cooperate in order to exploit as much as possible from their own capabilities at the lowest price. In those years arose a lot of research center, in order to develop and sell improvement for the PC market. In example, IBM - Microsoft that the latter, developed a new software for IBMs’ PC and hardware; or the astuteness of Jobs to implemented in his PC the improvements saw at Palo Alto Research Center. At the same time companies started to differentiate their products on the basis of software and uses (personal computer, workstation) This competition shake-out the market, leading it to a new composition of the industry in which companies had to provide a wide range of products, reducing prices and sharply moving into the low-end segment of he market. A lot of pressure arise from the clone markets, which focus his strategy to the customer fidelization, advertising, customer service. Brand image and loyalty becomes the critical point.

Until the 90s’ century, Apple had a competitive advantage over the competitor as IBM and Microsoft that justified the higher price of its PC, leading Apple to gain a high margin on its revenues, around 55%. But in 1990 Microsoft lunched its own new operating system based on Intel microprocessor, that counted 90% of the microprocessor in the world, and Microsoft earned the entire market share, leaving Apple in a niche, because developers opted for the dominant standard to deal