How Did Apple Inc. Embraces Opportunity?

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Technology Entrepreneurship

Individual Essay 1

MGMT 324

COURSE INSTRUCTOR

Lim Hong Hui

SUBMITTED BY

Deryn Theresia Tjoandi

(S9074672C)

How did Apple Inc. Embraces opportunity?

Apple Inc. has been one of the most successful companies in the world. Dated back in the late 1990s, Apple Computer was within 90 days of bankruptcy, with its market share tumbled to around 3%^[1] after the its previous leaders made non-strategic decisions. The company was at the brink of bankruptcy and it was not any match for the world renown IBM PCs at the time. Today, Apple innovative products have dominated the market ever since. The paper aims to analyse the success of the company by taking a glance at how Apple took on opportunity through many technological discontinuities and innovation outside the core, and most importantly how did Steve Job advance Apple’s growth with his entrepreneurial self.

Steve Job found Apple with his partner in 1977. With his vision of creating a ‘computer for the rest of us’, Jobs took some drastic steps to turnaround Apple’s decline in 1996. Being an entrepreneur, Jobs was able to identify opportunities through opportunity development, opportunity recognition and opportunity evaluation^[2]. In 2001, Jobs introduced a “digital hub” which is known today as the Macintosh^[3]. He was able to define and articulate market need of consumers who were becoming entrenched in a digital lifestyle. Jobs created Mac from a simple concept of ‘computer for the rest of us’ which then became more elaborate as it was continuously being developed. Having such a perception, Jobs redeployed resources away to offer products that could deliver a cutting-edge tightly integrated user experience.  Lastly, Jobs also explicitly called for evaluation of markets and resources at every level of development. With this framework in mind, Jobs was able to identify many opportunities in the market, creating many radical innovations in the years ahead.

With continuous and iterative evaluation processes, Apple went through a series of technological discontinuities for many of its innovations to make its products economically feasible. Technology discontinuities are typically defined by the extent to which a new product in comparison to the previous ones, goes through changes in the core concepts that form the basis of a product or in the linkages between a product’s key components^[4]. For instance, Jobs took on an architectural innovation^[5] when he created a new Macintosh toward his aim of a digital hub strategy. Jobs replaced PowerPC CPU chips with the new Intel chips^[6] that enabled Apple to build laptops that were both quicker and more energy efficient. The new chips also allowed Mac to run Microsoft Windows operating system, quelling a long-standing disadvantage of choosing Mac over Windows architectures. Similarly, the iPhones experienced much innovations from the first generation where the second generation iPhones were equipped with faster 3G network capabilities. Additionally, Apple released an upgraded iPhone every 12 to 15 months^[7] which iteratively improves on previous designs. Jobs recognized the need for technological discontinuities as there was a need for Apple products to reach a certain level of performance and cost in order for them to be technological and economically feasible.