Mistakes: lacking thorough consideration in planning of product strategy; oversight on efficiency and controlling; ambiguous leading style and leadership conflict; confusion of roles and tasks between managers and engineers.
PC industry: an industry of highly vertical dis-integration but compatibility, where each dis-integrated value layer is composed of many mutually competitive firms pursuing quality distinctiveness and cost advantage in component innovation by splitting, augmenting, substituting, excluding, inverting, and porting to PC system functions. The future of PC will evolve toward miniaturization incorporated high computing capability and agile mobility connecting to Internet. iPod and iTune have been broaden the product definition of computer as well as the evolution of calculator to PC and multimedia computer. Those all-in-one information appliances, e.g., handheld and network-based information devices, will be more and more important complements to PC and more or less be integrated with video and audio functions to become a whole product, a gateway to home entertainment and a controller of information applications.
You could be the providers of all possible complementary applications to Apple’s future PC-related world, such as the service provider of Internet infrastructure, the manufacturer of devices, the information packager, the data manipulation of web applets, and the information and content generator.
The strategy of product development strategy will be decisive for Apple’s future growth. Traditionally, Apple was used to adopt the close type of innovation and manufacturing configuration. However, a popular system product for mass market should be open licensed to feed the great market demands quickly as long as the core of system has been appropriated internally. It may be the main challenge to Apple coming from the WinTel conglomeration including Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, and so on, which is supported by global supply chain and firms of OEM, ODM, and EMS.
