How Sustainable is Apple’s Competitive position Introduction Apple started out simply as a computer company producing Macintosh computers and software, but has since evolved over the years to manufacture other products. It introduced iPods in 2001 for music players, in 2007, it started producing iPhones. Its products are consumer oriented and this has contributed to the success of the company. Apple also views innovation as basis of survival and business development (Yoffie, 2012). What historically have been Apple’s competitive advantages? Apple Inc. has rare case of building a real sustainable competitive advantage in comparison to other brands. These include brand appeal, and strong customer loyalty (Barney, 1991). Apple has successfully enabled strong customer loyalty through effectively fulfilling their customer needs using their unique designs and product innovations. This has given it apple a competitive edge in relation to its rival. They are able to keep their customers up to date with inform of the updates in the existing products and new product innovations. Apple uses a vertical integration strategy that enables it to develop its software and hard ware apps, and own operating system (IOS). This allows apple to have control over all the users that are hard to replicate by its rivals (Meyer, 2012). Brand appeal of apple by …show more content…
The android version has large number of users from Samsung, HTC and Sony, make it difficult for them to keep all users up to date with the latest versions for instance lollipop, which only a small percentage use.The protected ecosystem gave a competitive edge to apple therefore making Samsung want to create their own Tizen (a closed ecosystem). It could only be installed in limited smartphones appliances that most users did not own (Ren, Xie & Krabbendam,