Executive Summery
On January 27, 2010 Steve Jobs announced the ipad to the public at the Yerba Buena
Center for the Artsin San Francisco. Ipad took away the PC market by storm with over
2million units in the first 60 days since its launch (Reference 1). Due to the rapid
commercial success of the ipad, other electronic manufactures such as Samsun, Motorola,
Asus, Acer stepped into the market. Since then, the tablet market has revolutionised the
information and technology industry. The total tablets sold by all brands to date has
reached 75million (Reference 2) within 3 years, hence this growth introduces a promising
market for all tech companies.
Microsoft is a pioneer in the software industry, well known for their successful “MS
Windows” operating system. By the end of 2011, Microsoft dominated 78% of the
operating system market (Reference: Image 1). Due to the growth in the tablet industry
they found a perfect market opportunity to exploit by moving to the computer devices
market by capitalising the strength of their Operating system. Yet the strong competition
existing in the tablet market raises a question of this strategic move.
Image1
As Michael Porter mentioned “The essence of strategy formulation is coping with
competition… the corporate strategist’s goal is to find a position in the industry where
his or her company can best defend itself against these forces or can influence them in
its favour”.(Reference 3). Hence, the remaining passages will analyse impact on the
success of this strategic move via the five forces model.
