In last week’s lecture I asked the following question: If you were to identify competitors of Blackberry in the beginning of 200s, could you have included Apple and Google in the list? Chances are the answer would have been no. However, a few year later the competitive landscape had changed. In 2005 Google acquired Android, which by 2013 had become the most installed operating system (wikipedia). Apple introduced its highly successful iPhone in the summer of 2007. If you want to see the implications run the R script named (R_Blackberry.R) which is available on Learn. A more recent story is coming from Bloomberg (May 13) Apple’s $1 Billion China Deal Accentuates Ambitions for Cars. As you browse through this article try to think what it means in terms of the definition of competition and industry structure (topics covered in Chapter 2).
Topics and Readings for Week 3
Lecture: In order to understand the choices made by firms regarding technology adoption, we need to evaluate their choices in terms of their internal environment (resources and capabilities that the firm has been investing on and its strategic priorities) as well as the firm’s external environment (industry structure). These topics are covered in Chapter 2. (Read Chapter 2)
Seminar: We will review some of the theory that you have learned in your statistics class about confidence intervals and use it to generate confidence intervals for IT spending. (Review the R script posted on Learn CI_Analysis.R). We will use this as foundation to generate CI based on industry level IT spending data and industry level sales data from Compustat. You will need to start reviewing the financial ratios (Read Appendix 2A) and ROA decomposition (Read Appendix 2B).
Assignments/Quizzes.
The online quiz will be a based on Chapter 2 and material from the seminar. The quiz will be available on Friday at 12:30 pm.
Prof. Stratopoulos
