Innovation and New Technology for Apple Inc - myassignmenthelp

Question: Discuss about theInnovation and New Technology for Apple Inc. Answer: Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company which designs and sells consumer electronics, computer software and online services. It is headquartered in Cupertino, California. The hardware products manufactured by the company include iPhone smartphones, iPad tablet computers etc. It is the worlds largest information technology company and was founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne in April, 1976 (Rawlinson, 2017). Black Berry Limited is a Canadian company which designs and markets smartphones tablets and services. Founded in 1984, it was considered as one of the most dominant smart phone suppliers in the world till it lost its dominant position due to its success of Android and iOS systems (Blackberry , 2017). In this literature search, opinions stated in various journal articles regarding the reasons why incumbents i.e. Blackberry are beaten by the challengers i.e. Apple Inc. in the business would be stated. According to Nish and Silcoff (2015) in 2007, Apple Inc. transformed the competition landscape by creating a transition in the scenario of smartphones from something which was functional to a product which was beautiful. More than 1 million iPhones were sold in the first three months in the summer of 2007. When the first iPhone was released, Black Berry decided to beat the competition by manufacturing a touchscreen iPhone killer, which turned to be a complete flop. Blackberry was great in creating phones and dominated the market before Apple Inc launched its first iPhone. It was successful in creating a permanent shift of the customers who used other phones towards it. BlackBerry dominated the market by creating devices for e-mails and phone calls but with the launching of App store by Apple Inc., it changed the definition of smartphone entirely. It is the top leader with the market share of 45 % while Black Berry has now fallen to 32 % of the market. With the introduction of iPhone, Black Berry has lost its charm in the cell phone market. To make it worst, its management has been in denial ever since. Its shrinking sales, lowered brand power and incompetency has sent it downward with the expulsion of co- CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Basille. According to the opinion of Arthur (2013) Black Berry had the chances to survive and grow but it took the wrong direction. It did not adapt itself to the changing demands of the customers. Apples strategy was to shift its business focus from just designing iPods to mobile phones to store music, surf the net and make calls too. As for the case of Black Berry, the problem was not that it had lack of ideas, rather it made the wrong choices and failed to adapt itself with the changing market conditions. As per the opinion of Winter (2014) when Steve Jobs introduced iPhone in 2007, it was a small and pocket able computer of its time. It was not only for calculating and processing data like a business phone but also had the features of running apps along with making calls and playing music. Apple Incs strategy was to outperform by creating desktop class architecture in its phones. Black Berry was not able to cope up with the competition since it only excelled at making phones having the features of making phone calls and processing data. iPhones not only allowed the users to make calls but also allowed them to play games, videos and handle those tasks which required a laptop earlier. Black Berry failed to grasp this and continued to manufacture the same phones which it was manufacturing earlier. Black Berry lacked in its features and it was slow in updating its Operating System. Unless Black Berry overhauled its phones, it did not find any decent buyers in the market. The reason behind its failure was to comprehend the true nature of the device called smart phones (Sag and Waller, 2015). According to Divya and Kumar (2016) Black Berry was slow in reacting to market changes. Earlier, people were comfortable using Qwerty keyboards which were easier to handle e-mails and instant messages. Eventually, with the emergence of Apple iPhone, they became comfortable with touch screen devices and their large screens which helped them to surf the net and the apps in a better way. Black Berry failed to notice this transition .The company was stuck to the idea of manufacturing phones with plastic keys with little scroll balls. They failed to notice that their phones with plastic keys were no longer desirable among the users. They now preferred sleek elegant devices with touch screens. However, the company tried to manufacture Black Berry 10 which was a touch screen device with a modern look and feel, but it was too late. Moreover, Apple had come up with iOS at that time and it grabbed the market in such a way that those users who even wanted to use Black Berry were left without the core services they needed. If BlackBerry would have designed beautiful and elegant devices at the right time, it would have regrown back, but unfortunately it did not. Furthermore, it also depicted disturbing regularities in its gadgets. For example, it launched its playbook tablet without an email client on board. It was the major reason behind shifting its market to Apple iPhones. It believed that its users would wait for its superior product or tolerate its limitations because of its brand value , but they did not. Apples approach towards its manufacturing and marketing strategies made it more popular amongst the users and they shifted from Black Berry phones to iPhones. Thus, Black Berry which was known for its assets and advantages , portrayed its reluctance to accept the changes and therefore failed to capture the market. Another mistake which Black Berry committed was it kept BBM locked to its own hardware. Also, Black Berry manufactured phones which had bad designs with strange names which affected its popularity amongst its users. Apple recognized the need to design sleek and elegant devices with their easy to hold rectangular shapes, but Black Berry refused to follow the trend. Black Berry manufactured devices which were square in shape with plastic keys and scroll balls. These devices looked absurd and did not even fit into the pockets of the users. Then why would they buy these phones? Afterwards, when the company designed the right model they called it Priv which sounded absurd , hence it did not appeal to the users in the market. Another reason for Black Berrys failure was that its devices were never fashionable and trendy enough to catch the attention of the targeted users specially the young section of the society while Apple was successful in catching their attention and grabbing the market. Black Berry boasted of its highly secured Black Berry Enterprise Server Platform which guaranteed that the content was secured and cannot be decoded or hacked. But with time the governments started demanding access in nations such as India and Pakistan . Also, several network problems were the cause of losing faith in the Black Berry devices (Sircar, 2017). Also, the evolving of the corporate culture which encouraged its employees to bring their personal phones was the reason behind the decline in the sale of devices meant for sole corporate purpose such as Black Berry. According to Gotz, Stieger and Reips (2017) Apple devices provided a complete package of tools ranging from games to productivity tools. Additionally, they were good looking and had an ease of use. On the other hand, Black Berry failed to introduce new operating system to match the new offerings from its competitor Apple. Black Berrys focus was on enterprises and not on its consumers. It found success through selling to IT departments of large corporations which gradually fainted with time. In the present scenario, the companies are too reluctant to use Black Berry devices because of their outdated operating systems and restricted service offerings. Although the success of Black Berry came from sale of its devices from huge corporations, they secured some place amongst the consumers. But they failed to develop it because of their devices looked ugly as compared to iPhones. It was seen as a professional device for accessing e-mails; hence it did not capture the attention of the youth and failed to survive. The features of the smart phones launched by Apple ranged from games to productivity tools and the users were able to transform their phones instantly (Johnson et al., 2012). On the other hand, the users failed to do this with the help of Black Berry OS because of its limited availability of apps. Even after Black Berry launched its first smart phone 6 years later than the first iPhone, the problem was that the QNX based Black Berry OS was not easy to use. It had the gesture based operating system which was not user friendly and thus did not catch the attention of the target users (Budd et al., 2015). Likewise, the BBOS 10 were inferior versions of Apple iOS which resulted in an incomplete app which was substandard as compared to its counterpart Apple. Also, its features were not as impressive as Apple. For example, the quality of the camera was not as good as that of iPhone. Thus Black Berry lacked innovation which was needed to break the market of iPhones (Bala, Sharma and Kaur, 2015). Black Berry was an expensive and overpriced device as compared to Apple. It catered to a particular set of users i.e. corporations while Apple catered to all types of users including corporations. So, its cost proved to be much more than its utility. SO, it couldnt compete with its counterpart in this context (C?p?tn? and Dr?ghescu, 2015). Another reason of the failure of Black Berry was that it failed to leverage the fame of BBM. With the emergence of WhatsApp which became a prime messaging platform for mobile users, it lost its popularity (Youssef, 2013). Thus, to conclude, Black Berry departed from the cell phone market due to its unwillingness to adapt itself to the changing market conditions, Adapt or die is the lesson which the companies must follow in the current scenario. Black Berry is an example of risk associated with technology sector. With the launch of Apple iPhones, the stock prices of Black Berry declined. However, it made attempts to come back but it was too late to capture the market. Therefore, the failure of Black Berry has become a case study about what happens when a tech giant fails to adapt itself to changing needs of the technology market. References Arthur, C. (2013) Why BlackBerry failed . The Guardian [online]. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/05/why-blackberry-failed [Accessed 15th March, 2018]. Bala, K., Sharma, S. and Kaur, G. (2015) A Study on Smartphone based Operating System. International Journal of Computer Applications. 121(1), pp. 17-22. Blackberry (2017) About BlackBerry [online]. Available from: https://us.blackberry.com/company [Accessed 14th March, 2018]. Budd, N., Matulich, E., Breakwel, A., Liu , M.X., Schleper, C. and Murrian, R.M.(2015) The RIM BlackBerry PlayBook Disaster: B2B or B2C? Journal of Business Cases and Applications. 13(2015), pp. 1-11. C?p?tn?, G. and Dr?ghescu, F. (2015) Success Factors of New Product Launch: The Case of iPhone Launch. International Journal of Economics and Finance. 7(5), pp. 61-70. Divya , K. and Kumar, S.V.K. (2016) Comparative Analysis of Smart Phone Operating Systems Android, Apple IOS and Windows. International Journal of Scientific Engineering and Applied Science. 2(2),pp. 432-438. Gotz, F.M., Stieger, S. and Reips, U.D.(2017) Users of the main smartphone operating systems (iOS, Android) differ only little in personality. PLOS One . 12(5), pp. 1-18. Johnson, K., Li, Y., Phan, H., Singer, J. and Trinh, H.(2012)The Innovative Success that is Apple, Inc. Theses, Dissertations and Capstones. [online] Available from: https://mds.marshall.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1420context=etd [Accessed 15th March, 2018]. Nish, J.M. and Silcoff, S. (2015) The Inside Story of how the iPhone crippled BlackBerry. The Wall Street Journal [online]. Available from: https://www.wsj.com/articles/behind-the-rise-and-fall-of-blackberry-1432311912 [Accessed 14th March, 2018]. Rawlinson, N. (2017) History of Apple: The story of Steve Jobs and the company he founded. Macworld [online]. Available from: https://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/apple/history-of-apple-steve-jobs-mac-3606104/ [Accessed 14th March, 2018]. Sag, M. and Waller, S.W. (2015) Promoting Innovation. IOWA Law Review. 100(2015), pp. 2223-2246. Sircar, S. (2017) The Crypto Wars: Interpreting The Privacy Versus National Security Debate From A Standards Perspective [online] Available from: https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/1043831/Sircar_georgetown_0076M_13737.pdf?sequence=1 [Accessed 15th March, 2018]. Winter, J.M. (2014) Success Factors of Mobile Business Ecosystems From Hardware-Centric to Content and Advertising Based Business Models[online] Available from: https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/bitstream/handle/123456789/14467/lic_winter_juha_2014.pdf [Accessed 15th March, 2018]. Youssef, M.H.(2013) Strategic tensions within the smartphones industry: the case of BlackBerry. Education, Economy and Community. 2013(3),pp. 125-141.