From Pda to Smart Phone

From PDAs to Smart Phones

Khaled Deyab

Cal University

DBA in Health Care Management and Leadership

Introduction

Timing of entry is very important especially if there is increasing returns for that technology. There are some advantages and disadvantages to the entrants of a new technology market. Entrants can be divided into three categories “first movers”, “early followers”, and “late entrants.” First movers are the first entrants that sell a new product or service. Early followers are the ones who enter the market early, but not first, while late entrants enter the market when the product begins to penetrate the mass market or later.

There are some advantages for the first movers in the technology market. Some of these advantages are:

1) Brand loyalty and technological leadership.

2) Preemption of scarce assets.

3) Reaping increasing returns advantages.

4) Exploiting buyer switching costs.

On the other hand there are some disadvantages;

1) High research and development expenses.

2) Uncertainty of customer requirements.

3) Immature enabling technologies and complements.

4) Undeveloped supply and distribution Channels

When a new technology is being introduced to the world by a company, usually there are no appropriate suppliers or distributors. Where the company has to develop its own suppliers and distributors or assist in developing suppliers and developer market (Schilling, 2010).

In this paper  we are going to discuss the evolution of PDA, what contribute to its failure in the begging, how did some PDA companies succeeded, how did smart phone evolved, was Apple late entrance in the smart phone race a disadvantage and what contributed to their success.

Discussion

Why did most of the early PDA companies fail, even if they had innovative and sophisticated product designs?

Although PDA was sophisticated product design in the early 1990s but most of the companies that invested the PDA technology at that time had failed. There were two main categories that contributed to the failure.

The first category was within the technology itself where there were constraints on processing power and battery life which compromised the performance and/or size of the PDA. More memory and storage were required to use office software product which added to the size and the cost of the device. Greater processing power also required greater battery power, which affected the size of the final product. PDA developer companies were reliant on the development of batteries and modems by other firms. These complementary products were not easily available which slowed down the adoption rate of the PDA technology. Most of the early PDA companies failed because they run out of money and funds struggling with insufficient complementary goods, suppliers and distribution channels injunction with other factors (Schilling, 2010).