Apple competitive standing in terms of its main rivals

From the second e-Activity and the case study, determine how market commonality and resource similarity impact Apple’s competitive standing in terms of its main rivals. Provide specific examples to support your response.

Apple’s strategy during Steve Jobs reign as Chief Executive Officer (CEO) was to use a long development cycle that produced at least one large innovation each cycle. They would release these products usually in a yearly selling period, while still marketing the earlier models at cheaper prices. This allowed Apple to gain a large amount of anticipation for new products, as consumers were expecting something new and innovative each time a new product was announced while still offering cheaper alternatives to consumers via their old smart phone models. Apple was also able to attract and keep many consumers by bundling their other product offerings, such as iTunes, together with the use of the iPhone and iPad; the iPhone can double as an iPod for all intents and purposes. This was a great idea for them to do because it worked IPod, IPhone, IPad were and still are the talk of the town everywhere. Samsung’s marketplace strategy, on the other hand, is to flood the market with a myriad of products in a short period of time. Samsung appeals to more markets by providing a plethora of gadgets such as cell phones, smart-phones, tablets, etc. to both low and high-end markets meaning at least one of their products will, presumably, appeal to a person. Samsung has done well in the low-end market, but has only recently begun increasing its presence in the smart-phone market and has enjoyed a good amount of success thus far as a result. Samsung’s rapid market share increase in the smart-phone marketplace can be partially attributed to Samsung’s large amount of different devices as compared to Apple and other competitors. Lastly, Samsung is not only the biggest adopter of Google’s Android software, but they also have smart-phones running the Windows Phone OS as well. While Apple is narrowed to its own IOS, Samsung is not held by these same boundaries; Samsung’s flood the market strategy works so well because they are able to not only diversify their hardware, but the software that runs on their smart-phones as well.

Determine what additional steps Apple’s competitors are likely to take and how Apple will most likely respond. Explain your rationale.

I believe that Apple’s competitors will find a way to make a better more interesting product to sell to the people and Apple will come back with something similar, on the same lines or better in order to keeps competition flowing. I believe this because this is the process of competition in my view. Apple has it in their mind that because their number one competitor is Samsung that they have to constantly make better products than Samsung does. While they may make a better product they each have their own personal fan base so only their customers will continue to buy their products. The competition begins when one company is able to convert the other company’s customers over to their side.