Research Paper on:
Apple; Background and SWOT Analysis

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
and it may be argued the vision was copied later by Bill Gates and Microsoft. The vision was to bring easy to use computers to everyone. 1976 was a time  before the dominance of Microsoft and the Windows operating system had been established. Apple gained the first mover advantage with they launched in 1978; the Apple II was one that  had worked towards this vision; it was a computer that could be used straight out of the box. This launch was successful and Apple started to grow, with  Apple becoming the market leader and by the end of 1980 more than 100,000 Apple IIs were sold. It was on the back of this success that Apple undertook an  IPO1. The future may have looked bright, but Apple had not foreseen the way that the environment would change as when IBM entered the market Apple were not able to  sustain their position (Yoffie and Slind, 2006). IBM competed aggressively with the use of the more open system by IBM2. IBM also had a long established name associated with technology  and a high level of market power which it could use to get goods into the shops and sell them. IBM sales soared and Apple lost their first mover advantage.  However, Apple did fight back and developed new sources of differentiation. In 1985, there was a new design computer with the introduction  of the Macintosh, but it did not appeal to the to the main stream consumer (Yoffie and Slind, 2006). The IBM, and IBM clone machines, had better performance levels and  the open system led to much wider variety of software available from third party vendors which were not available for Apple machines. These disadvantages of the Apple outweighed the advantages