POST 3: APPLE

For Apple, define their industry (or industries) and how they create value? What are their competitive advantages and are they sustainable? What resources and capabilities can they/do they draw on to compete?

They are a company that sells luxury tech products. They make their product the best in the field and sell them to the people who care less about the price, bringing in a large percentage of income. I think Apple’s advantages are basically around 2 aspect:

1, an outstanding company profile, including: A, an iconic founder which they can always tell story around him, since Apple have intentionally turned him into a hero. B, a consistent design language, which increases their customer loyalty. C, price premium, it gives their consumer the proundness to show-off. It is easy to maintain as long as they can assure their product quality.

2, The high quality of their good and service. Esapecially the vertical intergration makes them closer to the consumers, the retail shops are sustainable resource for them to get in touch with consumers all over the world.

Name a competitor for each of Apple's competitive advantages who you believe can survive in the long term and say why?

I would Tesla is a very similar competitor. They also have an inconic founder, a consistenc design language, and the vertical intergration. However tesla has a much clearer vision, which will have benifit to consumer loyalty and investers’ wills.

POST 2: Amazon

For Amazon, define their industry (or industries) and how they create value? What are their competitive advantages and are they sustainable? What resources and capabilities can they/do they draw on to compete?

Amazon started as a book online shop, and has now expanded various businesses including retail, logistics, cloud services, intelligent software and hardware, and content platforms. The income is mostly contributed by the e-conmerce.

The first is their low-price strategy. It only costs a little to start a business on amazon. It attracts a lot of sellers and customers, and the former allows Amazon to step into variety of industries. Same reason for buying Whole Foods Supermarket - it’s mainly to integrate the fresh food category into the business section of Amazon to attract more users.

Followed by high user stikiness. After starting the Prime membership, shopping on Amazon will become more pleasant, so Amazon Prime can greatly increase user stickiness and order value. Moreover, prime members can enjoy online content such as prime video and prime music, which are published on the content platform built by Amazon, which can improve the development of Amazon's online platform.

Amazon is dare to try and some of the result became the new support of its businees. They are not affraid of failure because it has its massive amounts of user data as the base of attemptions and their undefeatable retail business. The massive user data, for instance, promoted the development of cloud technology, and the development of cloud technology has also become a support for Amazon’s bases for business development. It also incubates products such as Alexa, and helped them to build a collaborative and intricate ecosystem.

Name a competitor for each of Amazon's competitive advantages who you believe can survive in the long term and say why?

Google, over all, has a similar bussiness model, which is accumulating huge amount of users and turn them into resource and competitive advantages. Google uses daily digital products like Chrome and Gmail to attract users to join Google’s product line, just like Amazon uses its cheap and convinience to attract customers, and turn the users into user data for AI, or advertising audience, etc.