Future Course of Action for Apple - Essay Example

?Apple Inc. Assessment of Business Behavior and Models to The evolution of Apple over the decades has been a mixed story of success and failure based on good and bad business decision making. Apple’s initial run in the computing market was stinted by Apple’s monopolistic behavior which prevented Apple from diversifying and cooperating with other technological giants of that era. Apple has more or less always catered to the domestic consumer especially the domestic consumer who can afford to spend more especially in the more developed countries. Because of this reason, Apple’s global presence has never really been felt especially in the personal computer arena even though the age of the personal computer is already on the decline. This limitation applies equally well to Apple’s other technological ventures such as the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad and others where it is obvious that Apple’s products target the upper segments of the market alone. This is more often done by Apple through differentiating their products with larger price tags for example the i-series of products from Apple is generally 30% or more priced from other market competitors. Whereas companies like Nokia have been ruling the market through domination of the underdog customer, Apple has chosen not to do so. Recently as other competitors have jumped into Nokia’s market share, the company has held steady because the lower end of the market is still firmly in its hand. In Apple’s case this is very different. Time and again Apple has found itself in troubled waters because Apple’s market segment (more appropriately targeted customer segment) has come under attack from other product makers. This has meant the bleeding of revenue to other competitors while Apple scrambles to innovate their products in the market segment under attack in order to keep relevant. The case of Windows 7 is very relevant in this regard. The introduction of Windows 7 hit the iOS market for computing solutions rather hard and Apple’s domestic computing solutions user drifted out of hand while Apple scrambled to recapture their interest. Had Apple been more diversified such as in the government and the corporate sectors, the threat would not have been that dangerous. Currently Apple derives most of its revenue from the mobile computing lineup consisting of the iPod, the iPad and the iPhone. The segment of mobile computing is expected to rise all the more in coming years as people would be looking for simple, lightweight mobile devices instead of grounded desktops and bulky laptops. The question now is how Apple plans to survive in an already crowded environment. Historically Apple has been providing its core and peripheral consumers with something new every other quarter or so but this run at innovation seems like dying down now. Future Course of Action Strangely enough Apple has always had the “Steve Jobs” stigma. As long as Mr. Jobs was online, Apple’s “applecart” seemed to move in the right direction. In this sense, Apple has always been a Jobs-centric company. The death of Steve Jobs in recent days might spell disaster for Apple as a company because previous runs with Jobs provide ground for such belief. Apple can already be seen entangled in a losing battle as the company’s most recent release the iPhone 4S was a complete disaster. The primary reason that the iPhone 2G succeeded was because it gave something to the market that was never there already even with the large variety on hand. Apple fanatics and others were all expecting Apple to come out with some new and innovative device that would once again revolutionize the world of smart phones but Apple has failed to live up to these expectations. This serves as a beacon for Apple’s future course of action – the company should refrain from delivering half baked pizzas one after the other. The company needs to bring in something big and well planned and executed like Steve Jobs delivered the iPod lineage. For another thing, Apple needs to lower the price tags on its devices by using more components from the outside and by promoting and encouraging synergy with other chip manufacturers. Apple’s goal at dominating the electronic chips manufacturing market may even drive Apple out of business as newer and more innovative as well as cheaper products begin to take their toll on the Apple lineage. The current market consumer is more interested in the software end of the smart device they own and not in the nit grits of the hardware. The only concern with the hardware is that the smart device should be “fast” and as cheap as possible. Apple can only make its devices more fast and cheap if it allows more electronics from the maestros of the business namely manufacturers such as Qualcomm, ATI, Samsung and the like. Apple has already had similar experience in the case of the iPod’s flash memory as well as in the case of the iMac’s processors. Both cases were success stories for Apple. In order to make the current lineage a success, Apple will have to lower prices and find new customer niches because now it’s not just the iPhone that is selling but there is intense pressure and competition from HTC, Samsung, Motorola and LG. There is little doubt that the future market will see little more than smart devices taking over the regular functions of other computing devices. The bulk market share will move over to the mobile computing platforms. Apple needs to restructure and innovate in order to stay relevant to the category that it helped build out of scratch. Facebook Assessment of Business Behavior and Models to Date Facebook can trace its beginnings to recent years as a hobbyist idea more than a pure business enterprise. Over the years of operation, Facebook’s CEO has tried his best to extract monetization benefits from the business but with limited success. Facebook started out as a fascination of college students but soon became the preferred method of interaction throughout hundreds of campuses across the United States. The expansion of Facebook after this point in time was based largely on word of mouth as well as invitation from someone already on Facebook. This move was probably envisioned by the business in order to provide consumer privacy but along with privacy it also prohibited fast signups for Facebook. The real expansion of Facebook can be seen occurring once it opened up the option to sign up to everyone and anyone. This allowed a multitude of new users to connect to each other using Facebook whilst also providing fake profiles and pages that dot every social networking platform. Previously Facebook was restricting itself to a few customers alone but it has recently expanded its folds to allow access to teenagers, young adults as well as adults and the elderly. This has allowed Facebook to diversify its consumer base which is essential to aiding the business model. As such Facebook offers a number of different services to consumers such as photo sharing, activity sharing, group associations, instant messaging and the like but all of these services are pretty standard on all social networking platforms these days. Upon its introduction, these services were rare and not well configured but the situation today is different. The point in providing consumers top line services is to attract them to spend as much time as possible on Facebook in order to give them ads to view and click on. However Facebook has rather overdone this effect such that consumers spend too much time looking through their favorite apps rather than clicking on ads. Other than this, another reason for low click through rates is the fact that Facebook serves a lot of areas where consumers are not used to the idea of e-commerce. This serves as true for large parts of Asia as well as Africa and Latin America. The greatest amount of users dotting Facebook is also composed demographically of teenagers and young adults who have little money of their own to spend. Other groups with more money such as young adults and adults tend to dot websites like eBay and Amazon. Facebook has only emerged as a platform to connect various businesses together without any real monetary generation because its targeting of audiences has been sporadic. Future Course of Action The expansion of social networking websites often causes spammers and other such groups to take advantage of the platform by creating fake profiles and pages. This could either lead to the demise of the social networking system such as what happened with Orkut. The other possibility for the social networking platform administrators would be to carefully monitor the activity on these pages and profiles and to weed them out accordingly such as that being done by Badoo. Currently it is highly common to see users on Facebook with thousands of friends who utilize their friend feeds in order to distribute ads. It is simple for administrators to utilize such distinctions such as the fact that no user could have thousands of friends from within the same geographical community to remove these fake profiles and pages. Other than spamming, Facebook needs to realize that the core of its users is people with little fiscal authority of their own. Although the number of users for Facebook may be distributed equally throughout the sectors of age but the age groups who spend the greatest time on Facebook are generally teenagers and young adults with limited fiscal authority. Facebook needs to attract the older age groups more by providing them with something that can keep them online longer. The longer an average user stays on the website, the greater the chance that an ad will be clicked and a purchase will be made at an affiliate partner’s website. Given also the fact that Facebook has a plethora of millions of users, it has all the more leverage to utilize itself as a retailer. If Facebook could develop a retailing network that would deliver goods throughout the entire world, it would stand up as strong competition to websites such as e-Bay and Amazon that pose smaller social networks. The presence of entire communities of buyers on Facebook means that the authenticity of a user can easily be demonstrated through active monitoring of the network activities. This would add greater credibility to a Facebook market of its own kind. Moreover people could be invited to act as sellers too in the longer run. These sellers could be mandated to allow Facebook to take a part of their earnings with each sale for services such as acting as the escrow agent. As yet Facebook has failed to effectively utilize its large social network to generate large revenues but this situation could be turned around. Facebook needs to overhaul its existing revenue generation methods as the current methods may place Facebook between the devil and the deep blue sea. The use of My Connect by Facebook may be seen tantamount to selling off people’s privacies for small funds which may put Facebook into tough legal battled for choices it makes today. The future of Facebook needs to be more diversified such that it keeps away from impinging people’s privacy rights even if by mistake of design. Read More