Outsourcing and Its Impacts on Corporations - Research Paper Example

The paper looks at the core of Apple's business model and its operations, and identifies the key problem as relating to its need to manage its outsourcing relationships and networks in order to secure its manufacturing strategy. The ensuing analysis makes use of IOM concepts and tools to identify technological and management interventions to make the outsourcing strategy work (Wailgum, 2011; Terry, 2013; Chen, 2012; Kabin, 2013; Langlois and Robertson, 1989; Gupta, Kim and Levine, 2013; Smith, Buddress and Raedels, n.d.; Google, 2013; Reuters, 2013). II. Background Information The business problem is outsourcing and the impact of outsourcing on corporations, and this problem is culled from relevant business and academic articles and cases.

In general outsourcing is seen as providing benefit to many companies in terms of paring down costs of doing business and being able to delegate work that is better and more efficiently done by third parties so companies can focus on the things that they do well, and which add to their overall ability to compete and do well in their respective industries. Outsourcing has been a key reality in doing business for several decades now, and earnest literature recognizing its importance and its groundbreaking impacts on global business extends to at least 2006, with all industries and all kinds of firms profoundly affected by the outsourcing of different kinds of work and corporate functions to India and other parts of Asia, and with outsourcing becoming such a crucial issue that is has been singled out as a political issue in presidential elections in the US (Engardio, Arndt and Foust, 2006; Hochschild, 2012; Corn, 2012).

Of particular interest in this paper is the role that outsourcing plays in Apple Inc. Apple is in the business of designing, marketing and manufacturing devices for communications as well as for multimedia, geared towards consumer markets, together with computing devices, software platforms, services, and content and apps developed by parties for the operating systems and software platforms that the company develops. The core products of the firm include its iconic iPhones smart phones and iPad tablet computers, as well as Mac computers and laptops.

Platform-rendered services out of its core computing platforms are iTunes, and the Mac Store, as well as its App Store, which serve up music and other digital multimedia content, as well as third party software and apps. Together these software, services, devices and content delivery platforms make up an ecosystem that caters to the comprehensive network of products and services for everyday consumer computing and telecommunications. The company is also branching out into new areas of computing, including search and cloud computing, with a growing array of core technologies being developed and or acquired to beef up competencies in those emerging areas of consumer computing, and in reaction to new market realities and opportunities, as well as competition initiatives and strategies.

Its core competitors include Microsoft, Samsung, Google, Motorola, HP, Nokia, and HTC, for different aspects of its primary businesses (Google, 2013; Reuters, 2013). Apple has been extraordinarily successful not just in its own technological sector, but in general as an American company reaping extraordinary levels of revenues and profits, even besting oil in terms of its overall market valuation. This is reflected in the high historical