Response 1:
I think that eventually Apple will lose its competitive advantage because of the leadership of Tim Cook. As we know, Steve Jobs was a very innovative and bold leader who revolutionized the cell phone industry. I believe that Tim Cook needs to foster the innovation culture at Apple like Steve Jobs did to produce more products.
I believe that if Microsoft or another of Apple's rivals develops disruptive technology, Apple will suffer financially and lose market share, as more than half of Apple's revenue comes from the iPhone. I believe to maintain its competitive advantage, Apple needs to develop more innovative products. In the case of the iPhone 8, customer loyalty is Apple's competitive advantage.
However, I do not see customer loyalty as sustainable years from now with just small upgrades to the iPhone. Customer needs will evolve and without bold innovation to keep up, Apple will lag behind its rivals and may become obsolete - the way of the blackberry, nokia and others.
However, if Tim Cook embeds innovation into the organization, I see Apple still leading the pack for a long time to come. Right now, customer loyalty provides one of Apple's biggest competitive advantages, however, it is also the company's Achilles heel. Since customer power is a force, even though integration and switching costs are present, loss of customer loyalty would negativity affect the business, profitability and competitive advantage.
Response 2:
Using Adverse Conditions to an Organization's Advantage Chakravorti (2010) discusses four methods that corporate innovators use to turn adverse conditions to their advantage. Examine an organization of your choice and briefly discuss how the organization might use one of these methods I have chose to do Opportunity # 4 : THINK PLATFORM, NOT JUST PRODUCT "For years, Microsoft's Outlook has been losing ground to Google's Gmail and to the e-mail apps integrated into iPhones and other mobile devices.
But now the company is trying to inject new life into Outlook, attempting to transform it from a simple e-mail product into a platform that connects users to a multitude of third-party services such as Uber, Yelp, and Evernote.
Whether or not the leap from product to platform works is an immensely important question, not just for Microsoft but also for a growing number of businesses built around products or services" (Zhu and Furr, 2016). However, there are many companies that believe that a platform move will maybe bring around a struggling product.
This may appear to be an understatement. "A great platform starts with a great product, one that claims a critical mass of customers and provides enough value to keep them from defecting to competitors (in other words, is defensible). The product must also attract enough frequent users to make the potential platform appealing to third parties. After all, no platform can thrive unless it creates value for those third parties" (Furr and Zhu, 2016).