What Historically Have Been Apple’s Major Competitive Advantages? Use Barney’s Vrio Framework.

What historically have been Apple’s major competitive advantages? Use Barney’s VRIO framework.

In order to identify Apple’s historical competitive advantages by using Barney’s VRIO framework, we have to identify company’s resources step by step and then determine if Apple Inc. is well organized to capture value.

Valuable Resources

In 2006, Jobs decided to shift Apple to Intel’s chips, which allowed Macintosh to run faster with power consumed and longer battery life. The decision of shifting to Intel chips added value on Apple’s Macintosh product line and resulted in a significant increase of Macintosh sales. In addition, the change also allowed Mac PC to be compatible with Windows OS and Windows applications.

Rare Resources

By introducing iMac in August 2008, Apple started to gain market share in PC industry. With the unique feature of Apple’ all-in-one computer, such as colorful translucent cases with a distinctive eggshell design and supported “plug-and-play” peripherals, Apple caught up with the industry average and reversed back to a profitable condition.

Moreover, while environmental issues raised public environmental awareness and became a big concern of the world, Apple promoted itself as a go-green supporter, claiming that its computers were most energy efficient and made up with recyclable materials. Go-green strategy differentiated the Macintosh products and became a rare resource of Apple Inc. which is hard for other companies to apply.

Costly to Imitate Resources

In the beginning of new century, Apple introduced OS X, a new platform fully overhauled to be more stable with industrial strength. The new development of OS X cost Apple roughly $1 billion. And in addition, Apple issued upgrades every 12 to 18 months, comparing to a less frequency of Microsoft upgrades.

Later in 2006, as mentioned above, Jobs shifted Apple from IBM CPU to Intel chips. The change required a large investment to initiate and placed Apple in a competitive advantage...