Monthly Archives: September 2014

ABOUT COMPARING APPLES TO BLACKBERRIES

blackberry - apple

When the high tech world stood still for a single moment on September 19th for fully focusing on the release of the newest member of the Apple Family – the already notorious iPhone 6 –, BlackBerry seized the chance to enter the market with their brand new BlackBerry Passport “by the back door” successfully. The main reason for this success might not only be the innovative technology Blackberry users awaited in vain over the last couple of years, but also the failure of the iPhone 6 in withstanding the “pressure” of users’ pockets, as Lucas outlined in his blog post.

Thanks to Lucas’ careful analysis of potential consequences for Apple and the company’s reputation in the marketplace, the question arose for me why Apple did not avoid this now rather awkward debate from the beginning. Supposing that it took more than a year to develop the iPhone 6 and Apple is known for landmark innovation through careful analysis and tests, it is unimaginable that they just did not think of the consequences of using aluminum as basic material. So why did they take this risk? Were they just too confident in their market leadership? Or did they actually seek the public’s attention?

While these questions will probably remain unanswered, BlackBerry tries to take over parts of Apple’s market share by simply exploiting Apple’s failure to satisfy consumers’ needs. Nevertheless, this could not only be a unique opportunity for the struggling company to broaden their customer segments, but also a threat to their unique selling proposition in the market for business phones.

Still, the consumer will make the final decision who just bends their phones and who is actually brought to their knees in this battle.

 

References:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/passport-sales-bode-well-for-blackberry-analyst-says/article20838923/

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/technology-video/video-will-it-bend-we-see-if-the-blackberry-passport-is-stronger-than-an-iphone-6/article20801006/

BUSINESS ETHICS AND SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Picture business ethics

 

Principles, integrity, law, profit and social responsibility – all these words occurred in my head when I did my research for this blog post and after 5 minutes of brainstorming, my thoughts were closer to an intricate ball of wool than to a thread through my developing blog post.

Fortunately, I am not the first business person finding herself confronted with the buzz word “business ethics” and I could inspire myself with the ideas of great thinkers like Milton Friedman, R. Edward Freeman and Peter F. Drucker. Especially Peter Drucker’s opinion on social responsibility of businesses sparked my interest, as he distinguishes between social impacts and social problems – in other words, he looks at the problem from two different sides: On the one hand, he considers what businesses do to society and on the other hand, he reflects what businesses do for society. In doing so, he expects companies to take over responsibility when it comes to social impacts and clearly states that it is not a firm’s duty to solve social problems such as unequal income distribution. He justifies his point of view with a definition of responsibility: Someone is only responsible for problems in areas, where he or she has power of decision.

Therefore, I asked myself some questions: Do businesses have the competence to make decisions on social issues? Do we want businesses to have this competence? Who has the power to solve social problems? How are businesses affected by social problems and what can they do?

 

References:

www.ssireview.org/blog/entry/the_first_rule_of_corporate_social_responsibility_is_not_what_you_think

http://blogs.hbr.org/2010/06/how-did-peter-drucker-see-corp/