SWOT Analysis for Apple, Inc.
Personnel Management
May 20, 2013
Company history
Outcasts and electronic geeks Steven Wozniak and Steven Jobs were high school friends, who after high school graduation went to college, and both dropped out. Wozniak had been engaged in computer-design and in 1976, he designed what would become the Apple I. Jobs, insisted that he and Wozniak sell the machine. In April of 1976 the Apple Computer was invented. People took the Apple I lightly, and Apple did not get its break until 1977, with the invention of the Apple II. The Apple II was the first personal computer to have color graphics. With the invention of the Apple III and the addition of conservative shareholders Apple became a company that would prove the test of times.
Wozniak had a bad accident and took a leave from his position in the company. With Wozniak gone and a saturated market, Apple was at a standstill in growth and development. Jobs worked consistently on developing better personal computers but lacked the necessary management skills to make that successful. Realizing that he was unable to successfully run a company of that stature; Jobs decided to make John Sculley, then CEO of Pepsi-Cola, the CEO of Apple. IBM, which became a major competitor, came on the scene and forced Apple to pick up the pace in development. Sculley knew very little about the computer industry and almost instantaneously became at odds with Jobs. In 1985 Jobs made a move to take the company back but was ousted by the board of directors, leaving Sculley at the head of the company. With Sculley at the head, the resignation of Jobs, Apple took its first quarterly loss. Sculley also helped Apple to lose its exclusive rights to Mac technology to Microsoft’s Bill Gates. In 1987, Apple introduced the Mac II and with this powerful family of computers, Apple begins riding high until 1990’s. PC-clones and Microsoft’s Windows 3.0, which could run on virtually all of the PC-clones in the world, put...