MGW3381 – Management Information System

Contents
Apple Inc................................................................................................................................................. 1
Question 1: Describe the history and current development of Apple Inc. ......................................... 1
Apple II & Public Listing (1977-1990) .............................................................................................. 1
John Sculley & Steve Job’s .............................................................................................................. 1
Apple Under Jobs ............................................................................................................................ 1
Question 2: Identify and describe two examples of disruptive technologies created by Apple Inc,
supporting with a discussion on the Winners and Losers of the disruptive technologies ................. 2
iTunes .............................................................................................................................................. 2
iPhone ............................................................................................................................................. 2
Question 3: Discuss the core competencies of Apple Inc. .................................................................. 3
Technology Innovation Consistency ............................................................................................... 3
Distinction Knowledge of the Market and customer’s need and wants: ....................................... 3
Symantec Corporation ............................................................................................................................ 4
Question 1: Describe the history and current development of Symantec Corporation..................... 4
1990-1999 ....................................................................................................................................... 4
2000-Present Day ............................................................................................................................ 4
Question 2: Discuss the Symantec Endpoint Protection offered by Symantec Corporation.............. 5
Question 3: In this digital world, malware is being aimed at mobile devices such as smartphones.
Discuss one example of malware that had disrupted mobile operations. ......................................... 6
REFERENCE.......................................................................................................................................... 7

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 MGW3381 – Management Information System
Syed Emanual Sirajee (25374001)

Apple Inc
Apple Inc. is an American company that designs, develops, and sells consumer electronics,
computer software, and online services.

Question 1: Describe the history and current development of Apple Inc.

Apple Inc. was founded in the year 1976 by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in Cupertino,
California. Apple Inc. has become a multinational corporation that employees millions around
the globe to serve their loyal customers across multiple industry including consumer electronics
(Linzmayer,2004)

Apple II & Public Listing (1977-1990)

As a part of the “1977 Tinity”, Apple launched their most successful model of personal
computer of that time, the Apple II. Over the next two decades, Apple II was modified with
small tweaks and was sold to everyone’s surprise (Chandler, Hikino, Von Nordenflycht, 2009).
Towards the end of 1980, Apple tossed the idea of Initial Public Offering of its stock; later
when Apple did go public it generated more capital than any IPO since Ford Motor Company
in 1956 (Linzmayer,2004)

John Sculley & Steve Job’s

John Sculley joined Apple as CEO in 1987 from Pepsi, under his leadership Apple went on to
successfully acquire a few companies including Coral Software and Orion Networkd Systems.
During Sculley’s reign in Apple Inc, he saw the departure of Steve Jobs due to different visions
of the company. Schulley’s vision was to sell the Apple II and the newly introduced Macintosh
to be sold to education and home markets which were less venerable to the dominating IBM,
which opposed Job’s closed architecture vision to be an alternative to IBM.

Apple Under Jobs

With dropping stock prices in the mid-1990s, Apple acquired Steve Job’s company NeXT
Software and had asked him to step up as interim CEO. This recruitment changed Apple’s
fortunes from rags to riches and under Job’s vision and leadership Apple went on to disrupt the
technological markets in the early 2000s and changed the mobile phone industry permanently
with the introduction of the iPhone (Linzmayer,2004).

Apple Inc is now looking to become the first trillion-dollar company with healthy competition
from Amazon. Since 2012, when management first announced its intentions to do big share
buybacks, Apple has shrunk its outstanding publicly traded shares considerably. As of 2013,
there were 6.6 billion shares available to the public. Today, that count stands at a little over

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5.07 billion shares – a 23.2 percent reduction (Bloomberg). We tend to forget that the overall
market and a company’s sector are responsible for about two-thirds of its gains.

Question 2: Identify and describe two examples of disruptive technologies created by

Apple Inc, supporting with a discussion on the Winners and Losers of the disruptive
technologies

iTunes
On 9th of January 2001 Apple Inc announced the release of the iTunes, the platform that lets
customers search through a catalogue of over 500,000 tracks initially, for customers to buy
online. This technology changed the music industry and the online shopping industry forever,
with the ability to download any song in their iTunes music library for $0.99 and any album
for $9.99 without any subscription fees. It gave the freedom to the buyer to download the song
digitally and burn it onto CDs or even up to three computers or even listen to it on devices such
as the Apple iPod. Soon the Apple announced a similar software for Windows (Dubosson-
Torbay, Pigneur & Usunier,2004).

Within two weeks the digital store recorded two million download and iTunes become the
innovator in the digital music marketplace. Features such as the ability to browse for free and
purchase any song with the click of a button became extremely popular. The iTunes was praised
for its Digital Rights Management Systems, all tracks being encoded in Advanced Audio
Coding (ACC) rather than the marginally lower quality of MP3, also Apple employs its own
proprietary Digital Rights Management (DRM) system called FairPlay (Fisher,2004).

iPhone
Apple announced the launch of the iPhone in 2007, they were not the first corporation to
consider apps, but it once again reinvented a market when it launched its App Store in 2008.
Mobile applications became the great leap for the mobile device industry as apple started to
make them accessible to millions of consumers. Over the years, Apple has added new
applications, ability to multitask on their phones and even introduced ideas such as unlocking
the phone with the finger print. iPhone has changed and revolutionised the mobile device
industry permanently (Laugesen, & Yuan 2010, June).

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iPhone has also impacted the health industry, as with the newer generations of the phones users
can monitor various health metrics as well as access detailed health information,
connecting with health professionals and even receiving health advice virtually anytime
and anywhere, in other words, Apple’s success as a disrupter is because it continues to disrupt
by adapting experience (Lazonick, Mazzucato & Tulum, 2013).

Question 3: Discuss the core competencies of Apple Inc.

Technology Innovation Consistency

Apple Inc reputation in the tech industry was built on the ideology of producing quality and
premium products consistently. Efficient quality control requires consistency and Apple Inc
has been able to accomplish this by collecting all data and standardize their manufacturing
process. Standardization is the procedure by which systems and values are established in
individual, group and social life by natural evolution, custom, authority or common consent
which, by remaining (or being kept) invariable over a period of time in a changing environment
of unlimited modality, provide the stable basis essential for the growth and attainment of,
social or group identity and survival, communication, understanding and exchange of ideas,
good and services between individuals and groups, knowledge and experience for further
development, and consolidation of social, economic, and technological attainments at any
point of time so as to release creative energy for the search of higher and better values and
systems (Laugesen, & Yuan, 2010).

Distinction Knowledge of the Market and customer’s need and wants:

During the competitive pressure of today's rapid advanced technology, Apple focuses its
competing s trategy on innovation. By combining technological knowledge with a new idea of
selling music online, Apple came up with a revolutionary iPod music player and iTunes which
becomes most popular in the whole music industry. Apple continues designing its innovative
products like ease to use desktop computers, iPhone and iPad to maintain its reputation from
its consumers. The company invests little in research and development when compared to other
competitors. It spends only 3.7 percent of its revenue on R&D. The founder and CEO of Apple
Steve Jobs did believe that innovation has something to do on investing a lot of money on R&D
rather innovation is about the knowledge of the people that the company has and the way how

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to deploy them and how much to get from it. Rather than focu sing on existing products and
services, Apple's core competitive strategy is innovation of new product design with
exceptional elegant easy- of-use around customer experience (Lazonick, Mazzucato & Tulum,
2013).

Symantec Corporation
Symantec Corporation is an American company that develops software for security, storage
and backup as well as provides professional services to support its software.

Question 1: Describe the history and current development of Symantec Corporation.

Symantec Corporation is one of the world’s leading cyber security company, founded in the
year 1982 by Dr.Gray Hendrix. The company started off form the National Science Foundation
grants and was originally focused on artificial intelligence-related projects, including a
database program. In 1984 Symantec was acquired by another, smaller software startup
company, C&E Software, founded by Denis Coleman and Gordon Eubanks and headed by
Eubanks. C&E Software developed a combined file management and word processing program
called Q&A for "question and answer. The merged company retained the name Symantec. In
the year 1985 Symantec Corporation went into partnership with IBM by shipping out the Q&A
on every IBM-compatible computer of the time (Protection, 2008).

1990-1999
In May 1990, Symantec announced its intent to merge with and acquire Peter Norton
Computing, a developer of various utilities for DOS. Turner was appointed as product group
manager for the Norton business, and made responsible for the merger, with P&L
responsibility. Ted Schlein was made product group manager for the Q&A business.

2000-Present Day
Symantec announced the powerful threat detection technology used by its own world-class
research teams to uncover some of the most notable cyber-attacks in history is Now available
to its Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) customers. Announced new strategic partnership with
NTT Security Bolster web security services. Symantec is a fortune 500 company, operating

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one of the largest global data-intelligence networks, has provided leading security, backup and
availability solutions for where vital information is stored, accessed and shared. The company's
more than 19,000 employees reside in more than 50 countries. Ninety-nine percent of Fortune
500 companies are Symantec customers. In fiscal 2015, it recorded revenues of $6.5 billion
(Wood & Egar,2012).

Question 2: Discuss the Symantec Endpoint Protection offered by Symantec

Corporation.

Symantec Endpoint Protection combines Symantec Antivirus with advanced threat prevention
to deliver defence against malware for laptops, desktops and servers. It is increasing protection
and help lower total cost of ownership. Specifically, Symantec Endpoint Protection provides
protection technologies such as Antivirus and Antispyware, Firewall, Intrusion Prevention ,
Device Control and Network Access Control (Wood & Egar, 2012).

Last year, we saw 317 million new malware variants, while targeted attacks and zero-day
threats were at an all-time high. The threat environment is evolving quickly and given the size
and complexity of today's networks, organizations are struggling to keep up. Symantec
Endpoint Protection is designed to address these challenges with a layered approach to security
at the endpoint. It goes beyond traditional antivirus to include firewall, Intrusion Prevention
System (IPS) and advanced protection technologies powered by the world’s largest civilian
threat intelligence network. Symantec Insight technology blocks rapidly-mutating malware and
enables faster scan times, while SONAR stops zero-day threats by monitoring file behaviour
and blocking suspicious files while they execute. Granular policy settings such as application
control and external media control provide an added layer of security (Protection, 2008).

The latest version is integrated with Symantec Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) designed to
detect, respond and block targeted attacks faster. The integration offers the ability to
communicate directly with Symantec Endpoint Protection clients, flagging and reporting any
anomalous activity to ATP (Wood & Egar, 2012). The upcoming versions of the software is in
development and there are many changes being made to the code to provide better optimisation
in terminal services environments. Until these enhancements are realised, the steps in this
whitepaper will provide the same performance benefits (Wood & Egar,2012).

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Question 3: In this digital world, malware is being aimed at mobile devices such as
smartphones. Discuss one example of malware that had disrupted mobile operations.

According to security firm Check Point, in the year 2016, over 10 million Android devices
have been infected with a new piece of malware called HummingBad,. The HummingBad
malware can take over a smartphone or tablet, stealing and selling on user information – from
email accounts and contacts to banking information and everything needed for identify theft –
as well as downloading unauthorised apps and tapping on advertising. The malware can infect
an Android smartphone or tablet if the user browses the wrong site, in so called drive-by-
download attacks. HummingBad then attempts to gain access to the underlying Android system
by using “root access” to take full control. If it cannot gain root access it then tricks the user
into giving almost full control via a fake update notification (Nortan Report,2016).

Once the malware has control of the device it can use its control of permissions to force it to
download apps and tap on adverts to generate fraudulent advertising revenue potentially
without the user’s knowledge. The attackers could also sell access to the device or the user’s
information, the firm said. Checkpoint says that HummingBad-infected devices have been
detected across the globe with 1.6m devices in China and 1.35m in India topping the list. The
US has 288,800 infected devices, while the UK and Australia both have around 100,000
devices with HummingBad operating on them. For those that are impacted by HummingBad,
a factory reset might be the only recourse, although even then it could remain if it has gained
access to a protected part of the device through root access (Gibbs,2016).

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REFERENCE
Bajarin, T. (2016). How Apple's iPhone Changed These 5 Major Industries. [online] Time.
Available at: http://time.com/4832599/iphone-anniversary-industry-change/ [Accessed 12
May 2018].

Browning, E. S., Russolillo, S., & Vascellaro, J. (2012). Apple Now Biggest-Ever US
Company. Wall Street Journal, 21.

Chandler, A. D., Hikino, T., Von Nordenflycht, A., & Chandler, A. D. (2009). Inventing the
electronic century: The epic story of the consumer electronics and computer industries, with a
new preface (Vol. 47). Harvard University Press.

Dubosson-Torbay, M., Pigneur, Y., & Usunier, J. C. (2004, September). Business models for
music distribution after the P2P revolution. In Web Delivering of Music, 2004. WEDELMUSIC
2004. Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on (pp. 172-179). IEEE.

Fisher, W. W. (2004). iTunes: How Copyright, Contract, and Technology Shape the Business
of Digital Media.

Finkle, T. A., & Mallin, M. L. (2010). Steve Jobs and Apple, Inc. Journal of the International
Academy for Case Studies, 16(7), 31.

Gibbs, S. (2018). HummingBad malware infects 10m Android devices. [online] the Guardian.
Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/06/hummingbad-malware-
infects-10m-android-devices-information-apps-ads [Accessed 12 May 2018].

Haslam, C., Tsitsianis, N., Andersson, T., & Yin, Y. P. (2013, December). Apple's financial
success: The precariousness of power exercised in global value chains. In Accounting Forum
(Vol. 37, No. 4, pp. 268-279). Elsevier.

Linzmayer, O. W. (2004). Apple confidential 2.0: The definitive history of the world's most
colorful company. No Starch Press.

Lazonick, W., Mazzucato, M., & Tulum, Ö. (2013, December). Apple's changing business
model: What should the world's richest company do with all those profits?. In Accounting
Forum (Vol. 37, No. 4, pp. 249-267). Elsevier.

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Laugesen, J., & Yuan, Y. (2010, June). What factors contributed to the success of Apple's
iPhone?. In Mobile Business and 2010 Ninth Global Mobility Roundtable (ICMB-GMR), 2010
Ninth International Conference on (pp. 91-99). IEEE.

Protection, S. E. (2008). 11.0. Application and Device Control, 1-18.

Voida, A., Grinter, R. E., & Ducheneaut, N. (2006). Social practices around iTunes. In
Consuming music together (pp. 57-83). Springer, Dordrecht.

Wood, P., & Egan, G. (2012). Symantec internet security threat report 2011. Symantec Corp.,
Mountain View, CA, USA, Tech. Rep.

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