Competitive Strategy In a free economy, a multitude of firms compete for the business of the same customer segment. Therefore, if a firm is to succeed in attracting and retaining the maximum number of customers from the targeted segment, it must develop and successfully execute a strategy that has a distinct competitive advantage over its rivals. Thus, a competitive strategy is defined as a plan that attempts to define a position

Competitive Strategies and Government Policies Carnival Cruise Line: Carnival Cruise Line is a British-American cruise line headquartered in Florida, United States. It is one of the top ten cruise lines owned by Carnival Corporation & plc -- the largest operator of cruise ships in the world. Carnival Cruise line has the largest fleet size of 24 ships among all other subsidiaries of the Carnival Corporation. These ships provide deep sea cruising as

Competitive Strategies of Google and Microsoft The Battle for the Future of Search: Comparing the Brilliant, Competitive Cultures of Google and Microsoft Both Microsoft and Google have emerged as catalysts of remarkable growth in the high technology industry. Each of these companies have a very unique, finely-tuned series of strategies for managing the innovation processes, including the steps each rely on for creating new services. Each also has shown remarkable success at delivering

Companies that do not make such a choice run the risk of being caught in the middle. They may be good at everything, but excel at nothing. In business, however, success comes from developing competitive advantage, in particular sustainable competitive advantage. Firms therefore should focus their limited resources on excellence in one particular area, and be the best in the industry in that area. In Porter's generic strategies, a firm

Cost leadership Attracting more customers and gaining financial advantage over the competition as profits would increase 4 Forces the company to drastically reduce costs, meaning that product quality could suffer demises -4 0 6. Focus strategy Can achieve either of cost advantage or differentiation 4 Addresses a niche market -4 0 7. Differentiation strategy Product uniqueness which allows for the charging of a premium price to cover for the additionally incurred expenditure 5 Additional costs which will reduce overall financial gains (they will however be recuperated from

The factor for the major success of Microsoft in developing operating systems is that they usually tolerate a third party to write a program for them. Windows has managed to stay on top of its game because it has a variety of programs where one can choose from compared to MacOS distributions. Windows joined their forces with many programmers. Currently the danger of substitute systems of operation is at