Month: September 2010

Categories
Competiton

Apple iOS vs Google Android

Google's Android is quickly becoming a threat for Apple's iOS.

The Mac vs PC war for the personal computers market has existed since the creation of these devices. Nowadays, with the development of smartphones, the new battle is between Apple and Google operating systems. Apple has had the iOS for some years now, and the iPhone is a worldwide success. Oppositely, Google’s Android is quite new, but has had an exponential growth. In the last 6 months, Android phones totaled 32%, while Apple phones reached 25% of market share.

In terms of the features each OS offers, these are basically the same. However, Android’s competitive advantage seems its versatility: it can be installed in any smartphone. On the other hand, Apple insists on exclusivity on their own hardware (iPhone) and one single carrier in the US (AT&T). Some may say Google should develop its own hardware, but that is not their strategy. In any case, Apple’s next tactic should be making their iPhone available for other carriers (i.e. Verizon) in order to keep market share.

It’s true that Google’s success has not meant Apple’s failure until this point, but if Apple does not respond to this aggressive competition, this might happen in the future.

Further reading: Apple and Google’s smartphone war

Categories
Business Ethics

Bureaucracy – Unreasonable bonuses for executives

Executive Bonuses. Do they really deserve them?

The worldwide financial crisis of 2008 resulted in the collapse of many companies in the USA, some of which were helped financially by the government to prevent bankruptcy and probably massive unemployment. Due to the financial help, these companies could achieve extraordinary profits, which were distributed as bonuses for their senior executives. At the same time, lower-end workers did not receive bonuses and some were left unemployed. To what extent did these senior executives deserve those bonuses? Weren’t they responsible for the company going bankrupt or was the market system as a whole accountable for that?

On February 2009, President Obama attempted a solution by imposing a limit of $500,000 on these bonuses. Another possible solution in the long-term would be to encourage the development of more powerful companies and therefore have a more competitive market. There are skilled professionals out there that can do this but the barriers of entry are very high. In the short-term, the solution would be to increase the taxes on profits, which is reasonable given that the government itself helped these companies gain profits in the first place.

Further reading: Alternative Solutions

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