Apple Case Analysis In today's society, there is an ongoing interest in studying the forces that can provide a competitive advantage to organizations. In 2008, Michael Porter wrote an article titled “The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy.” In this article, he wrote about the five different forces that influence the attractiveness of an industry. All these forces have shaped the behavior of every single industry in the competitive market in today's society. To better understand the structure of the PC industry, using this five forces analysis would be very helpful. First, in the strength of new entrants, one of the main barriers to entry in this industry is economy of scale. In the PC industry, many companies have to start investing very large amounts of capital early on. All capital will gain towards economies of scale, such as the financial economy, the marketing economy, the technological economy and many other economies. Furthermore, this sector will also involve patents and rights in order to protect its innovations. Patents and rights are very important because they create another barrier for other competitors to enter this industry. Therefore, the barriers to entry in this industry are so high that the threat of new entrants into the PC industry is very low. The second force is the force of substitute products. Basically, anything that can replace a personal computer counts as a replacement. There are also many other PC manufacturing companies that are treated as replacements for Apple computers and the opposite is also true. While substitutes pose a threat to the industry, it can be beneficial because they may not have as many features as a PC. Therefore, there are many substitutes that have a great impact on each company's sales. Now the third force is suppliers and there are different types of suppliers for PC industry. Vendors that provide the hardware components, which consist of memory chips, disk drives and keyboards, have low bargaining power. This is due to the fact that the product is widely available at highly competitive prices. However, microprocessor and operating system suppliers have more bargaining power. There are only two major competitors, Intel and Microsoft, which is why these suppliers have more bargaining power. The fourth force would be that of buyers. There are five different categories that PC buyers fall into; home, small and medium-sized businesses, corporate, education and government.