One of the world's favorite tech brands, Apple has a tight hold on its spot as one of the tech Big Four. Founded by, and still led in the spirit of, the legendary Steve Jobs, Apple products have found their way into seemingly every household.
The company only hires the best of the best, and looks for whip-smart people who will push the envelope when it comes to what personal technology can do. Apple is one of the best-known tech companies of all time, one of the Big Five of tech, and for good reason. From the latest iPhone to the original Apple computer, the company has been an ingenious innovator of consumer technologies since its first days out of a home garage.
Founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak met through a mutual friend. It turned out to be a fated meeting that would change the path of modern technology forever. Steve Wozniak created the original prototype for the Apple I computer—the first computer to resemble the computer we know today—a model with a large monitor and a keyboard. However, Apple remains a tech giant to this day with a unique organizational structure and some of the most popular stock on the market.
Apple's structure as an organization is optimized around fostering innovation and ensuring support for strong leadership. The primary distinguishing characteristics of Apple's organizational structure are its spoke-and-wheel hierarchy, its product-based divisions, and its weak functional matrix, meaning there is strong interdivisional collaboration while still preserving the hierarchy.
The spoke-and-wheel hierarchy puts Tim Cook at the center, supported by an upper tier of management centered around business functions. For example, Apple has a senior vice president for retail and a senior vice president for worldwide marketing, and this leadership structure lets the top leaders address business needs. This portion of Apple's structure is derived from the functional type of organizational structure.
Under Steve Jobs, this hierarchy was rigid, but under Tim Cook, there has been more collaboration among different parts of the company, such as between the hardware and software teams. The vice presidents of the company also have more autonomy under Tim Cook than they had under Steve Jobs. The product-based divisions in Apple, on the other hand, are derived from the divisional type of organizational structure and are used to manage specific products that Apple creates. For example, there are senior vice presidents and vice presidents for software engineering in charge of iOS and macOS and for hardware engineering serving iPhone, iPad and Mac products.
Apple is characterized by collaboration among various components of the organization comprising the weak functional matrix characteristic of its structure. In this structure, top management determines project direction, with limited authority and control given to project heads, and strong collaboration between projects is encouraged.
Under this structure, the software and hardware teams can collaborate closely and share information and innovations. The structure encourages effective and rapid innovation. This organizational structure fosters strong corporate control but makes the organization less flexible and less likely to support rapid change, as everything must go through Tim Cook and the top management. Apple's Board of Directors currently consists of seven people, with Arthur D. Levinson serving as Chairman of the Board.
Sugar, Ph. Wagner co-founder and director of BlackRock. Apple stock AAPL is some of the most widely traded stock on the market, with about 4. However, a sizable portion of AAPL is owned by top leadership within Apple, and, since , Apple has invested billions in buying back its own stock. The second highest stockholder is Tim Cook himself, with , shares as of August 24, Jobs was also one of the savviest negotiators in Silicon Valley.
He pulled off a major coup in by convincing the "big five" record labels to allow Apple to sell their music in the iTunes Music Store, helping to cement the popularity of the iPod. Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer in Since then, Apple has been run by Jobs's longtime deputy, Tim Cook. Before he died, Jobs warned Cook against trying to run Apple by asking how Jobs would have handled each decision.
Cook appears to have taken that advice to heart. Tim Cook. Jobs ran Apple as if it were a small, founder-owned startup. All significant decisions flowed through Jobs. Often, if Jobs wasn't personally interested in a particular task, Apple just wouldn't do it. For example, Jobs shut down Apple's charitable giving program in and never re-started it.
Jobs directly supervised Apple's mergers and acquisitions, which meant that Apple didn't acquire very many companies. The companies Apple did acquire were invariably small, and they were absorbed into the Apple hierarchy rather than continuing to operate as separate subsidiaries.
Tim Cook has taken a more conventional approach to managing Apple. Fewer decisions flow through Cook directly, which makes it possible for Apple to handle more tasks in parallel.
One of Cook's first moves after taking over at Apple was to establish a matching-gifts program. He also expanded Apple's mergers and acquisitions department, giving the company the ability to consider several deals simultaneously without involving Cook in the details.
Since taking over at Apple, Tim Cook has tried to capitalize on Apple's status as the only technology company that is also a luxury brand. In , Apple purchased Beats , a company that makes high-priced headphones as well as a streaming music service. And rather than folding Beats into Apple, as Jobs would likely have done, Cook will allow it to continue operating as an independent subsidiary. More than half of Apple's revenue comes from iPhones. Macs and iPads are also significant revenue sources.
Here is the data from Apple's fiscal year, which ended on September 30, No company is better than Apple at building devices that are powerful, beautiful, and easy to use. Over the last four decades, Apple has produced some of the most beloved products in the technology industry, including the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. How does Apple do it? A big factor is the distinctive approach to designing products pioneered by Steve Jobs.
It helps that Apple develops so much of its technology in-house. Most technology products are highly modular—most Dell computers, for example, have chips from Intel and an operating system provided by Microsoft. Apple products are different. Apple even sells iPhones in Apple-designed retail stores. Steve Jobs believed that this kind of vertical integration was essential to creating a great user experience.
When hardware and software are designed by different companies, it's more difficult to make them work together seamlessly. Creating the whole product allows Apple designers to control every aspect of the user experience and ensure that everything lives up to Apple's exacting standards. In , Steve Jobs called the team that created Apple's MobileMe online service to an auditorium and asked a question: "Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do? MobileMe suffered from crippling reliability problems, and it was neither the first or the last time Apple's online services have disappointed customers.
Apple has run four online services in the last 15 years — iTools in ,. Mac in , MobileMe in , and iCloud in All have been plagued by reliability and performance issues.
Through the rest of the s, Apple was still doing well and in it posted its highest profits yet. This was, however, mostly due to the plans that Jobs had already set in motion before he left, most notably his deal with a tiny company by the name of Adobe, creator of the Adobe Portable Document Format PDF.
Together the two companies created the phenomenon known as desktop publishing. Back in Sculley turned down an appeal from Microsoft founder Bill Gates to license its software. This decision would later come back to haunt him because Microsoft, whose Windows operating system OS featured a graphical interface similar to Apple's, became their toughest competition in the late s and throughout the s.
Over the course of a few years, Apple's market share suffered slowly after its peak in and by , experts believed the company to be doomed. It was not until , when Apple was desperately in need of an operating system, that it bought out NeXT Software Jobs' company and the board of directors decided to ask for some help from an old friend: Steve Jobs. Jobs decided to make some changes around Apple. He forged an alliance with Microsoft to create a Mac version of its popular office software.
Not long after this decision was the turning point for the company. Jobs revamped the computers and introduced the iBook a personal laptop followed by iPod, an mp3 player, which became market leader. The iPhone, a touch screen cellular phone, introduced in was one of the world' most successful products and the company has released several new versions since. Other popular products include iPad tablet and Apple Watch.
The popularity of iPhones made Apple the first company valued at one trillion dollars in and two years later it doubled that figure. If you have any further questions, please Ask A Librarian. The following titles link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog.
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