301 Final Exam Vocab Flashcards
Sustainable Competitive Advantage
Financial performance that consistently outperforms industry averages.
Operational Effectiveness
Perfoming the same tasks better than rivals perform them
Commodity
A basic good that can be interchanges with nearly identical offerings.
Fast Follower Problem
Exists when savvy rivals watch a pioneers efforts, learn from their successes and missteps, then enter the market quickly with a comparable or superior product at a lower cost before the first mover can dominate.
Strategic Positioning
Performing different tasks than rivals, or the same tasks in a different way.
Straddling
Attempts to occupy more than one position, while failing to match the beenfits of a more efficient singularly focused rival.
Resource Based View of Competetive Advantage
Resources must be valuable, rare, imperfectly imitable, and nonsubstitutable.
Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM)
A technology that increases the transmission capacity, and speed, of fiber-optic cable.
Imitation Resistant Value Chain
A way of doing business that competitors struggle to replicate and that frequently involves technology in a key enabling role
Value Chain
The set of activities through which a product or service is created and delivered to customers
Scale Advantages
Advantages related to size
Economies of Scale
When costs can be spread across increasing units of production or in serving multiple customers. Businesses that have favorable economies of scale are also referred to as highly scalable
Switching Costs
The cost a consumer incurs when moving from one product to another. Increase the network effect
Network Effects
When the value of a product or service increases as the number of users increases. Also called Metcalfe’s Law, network externalitites.
Distribution Channels
The path thorugh which product or services get to customers
Application Programming Interfaces
Programming hooks that allow for other firms to tap into their services.
Non-Practicing Entities (NPEs)
Patent trolls, make money by acquiring and asserting patents, rather than bringing products and service to market.
Porter’s Five Forces
Rivalry among existing competitors, threat of new entrants, threat of substitute products, bargaining power of buyer and suppliers.
Price Transparancy
The degree to which complete information is available
Information Asymmetry
A decision situation where one party has more or better information.
Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs)
Early name for handheld mobile computing devices
Point of Sale (POS) System
Transaction processing systems that capture customer purchases. E.g. cash resgisters
Vertical Intergration
When a single firm owns severak layers in its value chain
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Tags
Small chip-based tags that wirelessly emit a unique code for the item that they are attached to.
Omnichannel
Retail approach that offers consumers and intergrated and complementary set of shop, sale and return experiences. E.g online, in store
Showrooming
Customers browse at physical retailers, but purchase products from lower-cost online rivals
Collaborative Filtering
Software that monitors trends among customers and uses this data to personalize individual customer’s experience
Coopetition
A situation where firms both cooperate and compete with one another, aka frenemies
Windowing
Making content available to a given distribution channel for a specific window of time.
Transfer Pricing
When divisions of the same company transact with each other
Congestion Effect
When increasing numbers of users lowers the value of a product or service
Decision Fatigue
When customers avoid selection decision with an overwhelming number of choices
Data Warehouse
A set of databases designed to support decision making in an organization
Disintermediation
Removing an organization from a firm’s distribution channel. Collapses the path between supplier and customer
Channel Conflict
When a firm’s potential partner see that firm as a threat
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
The full cost of owning a product, includes direct and indirect costs e.g purchase price, training
Customer Aquisition Costs
The amount of money a firm spends to convince a customer to buy a product or service.
Platforms
Product and services that allow for the development and intergration of software products and other complementary goods E.g. window, iOS
Daily Active Users (DAU)
The number of unqiue visitors, on averagem who use a product or service
One-Sided Market
Derives most of its value from a single class of users e.g instant messaging
Same-Side Exchange Benefits
Derived by interaction among members of a single class of participants
Two-Sided Market
Comprises two distinct categories of participant, both of which are needed to deliver value for the network to work E.g Uber drivers and riders
Cross-Side Exchnage Benefit
When an increase in number of users on one side of the market (e.g console owners) creates a rise in the other side (software developers)
Technological Leapfrogging
When a new technology is so superior that the value overcomes the total resistanct that older technologies might enjoy
Blue Ocean Strategy
Firms seek to create and compete in uncontested “blue ocean” market spaces, rather than competing in spaces and ways that have attracted many similar rivals
Convergence
When two or more markets, once considered distinctly seperate, begin to offer similar features and capabilites E.g. mobile phones and media players
Envelopment
When one market attempts to conquer a new market by making it a subset, component, or feature of its primary offering
Backward Compatibility
Ability to take advantage of complementary products developed for a prior generation of technology
Adaptor
A product that allows a firm to tap into the complementary products, data, or user base of another product or service
Osborne Effect
When a firm preannounces a forthcoming product or service and experiences a sharp and detrimental drop in sales of current offerings as users wait for the new item
Open Source Software (OSS)
Software that is free and where anyone can look at and potentially modify the code
Cloud Computing
Replacing computing resources (hardware or software) with service provided over the internet
Software as a Service (SaaS
A form of cloud computing where a firm subscribes to a thrid-party and recieves a service that is delived online
Virtualization
A type of software that allows a single computer to function as several different computers. Underpins most cloud computing efforts, can make computing more efficient, cost-effective, and scalable. E.g VMware
Linux
An open source software operating system
LAMP
Linux operating system, Apache Web sever software, MySQL database, and any program languages that start with P (Python, Perl, and PHP)
Scalability
Ability to either handle increasing workloads or to be easily expanded to manage workload increases.
Utility Computing
A form of cloud computing where a firm develops its own software, and then runs it over the internet ona service provider’s computers
Saas, Paas, Iaas
Software, platforms, infrastructure as a Service. The further down you go, the more support and maintenance services needed.
Service Level Agreement (SLA)
A negotiated agreement between the customer and the vendor
Vertical Niches
Products and service designed to target a specific industry, aka vertical markets. E.g. pharma, legal
Platform as a Service
Where cloud providers offer services that include the hardware, operating system, development tools, testing, and hosting (the platform) that its customers use to build their own applications on the providers infrastructure
Infrastructure as a Service
Where cloud providers offer services that include running the remote hardware, storage, and networking (the infrastructure), but the client firms can choose the software used.
Cloudbursting
The use of cloud computing to provide excess capacity during periods of spiking demands. A scalability solution
Black Swans
Unpredicted, but highly impactful events. Scalable computing resources can help a firm deal with spiking impact from black swan events
Server Farm
A massive network of computer servers running software to coordinate their collective use. Provide the infrastructure backbone to Saas and hardware cloud efforts.
Containers
A type of virtualization that allows for shared operating systems for more resource savings and faster execution.
Virtual Desktops
When a firm runs an instance of a PC’s software on another machine and simply delivers the image of what’s executing to the remote device.
