My Essay

1. Introduction

Apple is a multinational cooperation which was established on April, 1976 with their first hand made computer. In the earlier time, Apple experimented with lots of products in the market. Eventually, all these products significantly decreased their market shares. The company went under lots of loss. After the withdrawal of Steve Jobs in the year 1985, the company suffered a lot. After the return of CEO position of its founder, Steve Jobs, the company began to rise.

2. The evaluation of Steve jobs

In terms of Steven Jobs who is well known for being the co-founder and chief executive officer of Apple, his work drives forward the development of products that are both functional and elegant, According to the John Kotter's 8 steps Model of Change (1997), we can understand why Jobs has achieved such success as a strategic leader,

The first reason is due to Job's Centralized style of leadership. According to Kotter, establishing a sense of urgency is crucial, Steve Jobs managed to achieve it by imposing intense work and examining the market. He reformed 70 % of products in development, which were not good enough and he fired some of the board members who resisted change.

The second reason is Jobs formed a powerful guiding coalition. He hired the employees who had the abilities to carry out strategic innovation and reorganized board which can share Job's view.

Next, Jobs created a vision which building a unique marketing strategy, this strategy aimed to lead Apple into the consumer electronics and entertainment business. Jobs managed to communicate the vision by working closely with employees. He focused on every product and still got a team which invented 103 Apple patents.

Besides, Jobs empowered people to act on the vision. He did it by building a culture of innovation and encouraged people to think ‘out of the box' and shared with others the coolest new thing they thought.

Finally, Jobs consolidated improvements to produce further change, like i-Mac which diversified into new industries and expanded customer base.

3. The key features of apple industry

The key features of Apple Industry can be divided into two parts--external and internal. The analysis of external key features is based on Michael Porter's Five Force Framework (Porter, 2008), which provide a baseline for sign up strengths and weakness for a company. These external key features are closely related with the competition environment.

The threat of established rivals is high. There are numerous competitors in the market, for example, IBM, Microsoft, Dell and Intel, which will lead to fierce competition. Facing with this high threat, Apple has positioned the company by means of differentiation and innovation.

Customers are important for the reason that they will force down the price by making decisions from the huge amount of choices. This means power of buyers, more specifically, the bargain power of buyers. Apple has already built up a loyal customer base and the majority of buyers are individual buyers who have low bargain power.

Suppliers will constrain the profitability if the change to higher price. Apple has intimate interaction between operating system and the hardware. Meanwhile rely on the strategy that tightly integration of its own operating system, hardware and applications.

Potential entrants are the company which aims to achieve more market share in another market. Apple did so when it entered the music industry by iPod. The market which Apple engaged is not so complicated, that means the entry barriers are comparatively low. However, in fact it is hard to compete with Apple, for Apple has occupied a large share of the market.

Substitute products will suffer the profitability and lure customers away. Apple's tightly control of the operating system and hardware makes it impossible to be replaced. Even there are lots of similar products in the same market; none of them could combine the functions