Strategic Scaffolding at Apple Strategic

Strategic Scaffolding at Apple Strategic Scaffolding for Apple Before Steve Jobs The strategic scaffolding of Apple during the time period Steve Jobs was away (1986 -- 1997) is comparable to many other technology companies at the time who had become reliant more on price/performance than uniqueness of customer experience or brand. The CEO and senior management of Apple were managing the company more like a traditional PC manufacturer, less like a disruptive innovator.

Strategic scaffolding techniques including an analysis of the persona, performance, puzzle, pattern and composite portrait of the company illustrate a business competing more on price and less on a differentiated user experience (Keidel, 2010). Analysis of Apple, 1986 -- 1997 Using the strategic scaffolding framework to analyze the time period of Apple's history between 1986 -- 1997 shows an organization with a significantly different perspective on resources and how it manages constraints compared to today.

One of the most significant differences that Apple had then was a different organizational character in terms of value, perception and valuation of time, and a significantly different technical acumen as well, all dimensions of how companies parse time (Keidel, 2010). All of these factors contributed to Apple also having a completely different persona, or personality relative to its peer organizations at the time.

The persona was to a large extent defined by its exceptional level of support from its customers, many of which had for decades purchased the latest generation computer systems, PDAs and other personal electronics devices (Sakakibara, Lindholm, Ainamo, 1995). Apple had been very successful in taking an initial market strategy based on "the computer for the rest of us" positioning and creating a passionate group of users globally who would willingly invest thousands of hours in beta-testing products for no charge back to Apple.

Apple continued to cultivate this persona of being the computer for the everyman so to speak, going so far as to define a marketing strategy that embraced and celebrated non-conformity around the George Orwell book, 1984. While this occurred during the time period when Steve Jobs was with the company, the residual effects of this strategy was what carried the company through the 1986 -- 1997 timeframe.

In many respects, 1984 was a critical metric that would define the company for decades to come, because it celebrated being different -- a key trait of why so many customers became such strong fans over time. Based on a scaffolding analysis the performance aspects of Apple during this time period, their focus on relying on Moore's Law was a primary concern, followed by continuing their core strengths in desktop publishing and graphics.

Apple's senior management continued to pursue the traditional areas of cost reduction and performance gains that computers in general and microprocessors specifically could provide. This led to performance metrics that also pushed the company more in the direction of price competition with Microsoft Windows-based laptops and PCs that were designed around the much less expensive Intel processors.

Apple held tightly to the metrics of graphics performance and the design of processors from Motorola that could manage millions of graphical computations per second, making them the most effective server, desktop and laptop systems commercially available for advanced graphics functions. Apple continued to hold to very high performance engineering metrics of performance for their systems, including millions of graphic calculations per second, refresh rates on vector vs. raster graphics, wire-frame and 3D modeling performance, and refresh rates of their screens.

What began to occur in the company's culture as a result of this focus on graphics performance and CPU acceleration was a bifurcation or splitting of product lines. At the high end Apple was gradually turning into a workstation company that could easily challenge Sun Microsystems or Silicon Graphics for supremacy of graphically-based calculations. At the low-end, the company was pursuing an aggressive strategy of dominating special-purpose laptops.

This strategy was entirely predicated on the core metrics of price/performance on hardware defining a culture that put pricing above all else, paradoxically nearly driving the company out of business during this period. The focus on metrics that were meant to purely define the Apple competitive advantage made the company descend into pricing wars with competitors whose business models were much more attuned to pricing competition.

The metrics the company had embraced during this time also led to software becoming secondary as these applications could not be measured to the same level of performance and precision as hardware. Tragically the core strength of what would eventually lead Apple to dominate in graphics and in phones, MPs players and tablets was nearly lost due to a myopic focus on metrics on hardware performance alone.

The puzzle that Apple was beginning to construct was a reliance on hardware and an inability to create long-term value through intellectual property (IP) which for Apple would have been disastrous over the long-term. The pattern that began to emerge as a result of this focus on performance as also evident in how the company continued to focus on distribution channels that would eventually further take differentiation from their core products.

These channels included mass market merchandisers that competed on price and fell into the Windows-Intel (Wintel) alliance framework and mindset (Berling, 1993). Apple was.