Apple, Inc: The History Of Apple Inc.

Apple, encapsulated in that name are the ideals and paradigms that have made Apple the most successful brand of the early 21st century. The connotations of that name Apple is far reaching immediately conveying to one the aims, goals and dreams of this company. As Steve Chazin (2008) put it, “They are making complex things simple and elegant”. In recent times one can easily juxtapose the word innovation with Apple, they have become synonymous with each other and rightly so in that Apple’s ability to dislodge the hegemony that Microsoft had presided over the software/hardware market required unprecedented innovative efforts. These innovative efforts were at the foundations of this company where in the 1970’s they introduced the television as a display system of watching and cassette interface for listening and recording programs. This paper attempts to gauge and give an appraisal through marketing lens specifically targeting their use of Neil Borden’s marketing mix elements (product, place, promotion & price).

Historical Background

The history of apple is not shy of turbulence with large periods of its early stages met with instability and downturn. Apple Inc. was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and was established on April 1, 1976 and incorporated the company on January 3rd 1977. The first two decades of its inception Apple was predominately in the business of manufacturing personal computers however as alluded to it faced rocky sales and low market shares during the 90’s. Steve Jobs, one of the original founders of the enterprise who had been dismissed in the mid 80’s following differences in vision for the companies future, returned to Apple in 1986 after Apple had acquired his then company NeXT (Apple Inc., 1...

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...This frontier has reaped major benefits for their competitors in the Android market with a wide range of products targeting all income groups. Apple has begun the foray into developing products for lower income groups with the production of the iPhone 5c which is priced cheaper than it’s flagship product the iPhone 5s. A further advancement in that direction would reap major benefits for Apple. This second concern deals with a mixture of place and product in the marketing mix. Apple offers its operating system exclusively to Apple products and its unquestioned the success of that strategy, however, it must be said there exists a potential and real prospect of complete Apple domination of the software industry if it were to allow its operating system to float onto to other hardware providers in much the similar manner in which Microsoft has benefited greatly from.