In Mass Customization, Claire Brayshay takes an interesting
look at market cycles and the movement from mass marketing to high
personalization and alternating to individual needs.  The importance of personalized products and services can be easily seen looking at the cell phone or in particular
smartphone industry. When IPhone was launched, Apple enjoyed high sales due to
its many competitive advantages such as early entrance. Soon after many companies followed and created products that were extremely similar when it came to hardware. At this point the needed competitive advantage could only be created by designing a superior software. In 2008 Apple, Blackberry and HTC started a new battle over the control of the smartphone market. Apple launched the IPhone 3G, BlackBerry Launched the Bold 9000 and HTC launched Dream and Magic that were based on Android platform.  I, as Rogers’s sales representative (Rogers was the only company that had all three phones) at the time, used to make the following distinctions:

1. Blackberry is highly personalisable, especially
   in areas important to business users, but it’s hard to use.
2. IPhone is extremely entertaining and simple to
   use, but not personalisable.
3. Android is highly personalisable and easy to use,
   but it is very new and glitches are not known.

To no one’s surprise Blackberry and IPhone dominated the
sales that year and left the Android devices in dust. Despite this failure, many
other cell phone producers such as Samsung and LG became intrigued with Android
interface as it was extremely user friendly (what Blackberry was missing) and
highly personalisable (what IPhone was missing). Three years later, in 2011,
Samsung Released Galaxy S II which was called the world’s first super phone and managed to sell ten million units in 6 month.  Anroid Platform as of Last month has gained higher market share than both BlackBerry and Apple.