The world has grown increasingly complex, resulting from the greater interdependence among world economies (Thompson, 2002). Successful organization is largely determined by how well the organization adjusts all its tangible and intangible properties to keep itself on track with its surrounding (Armenakes & Bedeian, 1999). Strategy was concerned to manage firm’s activities and resources to the environment in which it operates. This essay will analyse the micro and macro external environment in the part five years (2000 to 2006) of IBM Company by using PESTEL and five forces model to analyse in the first part. The second part will discuss about the advantages and disadvantages of the two possible alternative strategies for IBM.
Part 1: Analysis of Micro and Macro External Environment
1.1 PESTEL Analysis
The external factors can be divided into six broadly categories which are political, environment, social, technology, environment and legal (Johnson, 2005). Such external factors usually are out of the firm's control and sometimes present themselves as threats. In this case, political factor, environmental factor and technology factor will be used to analyse the computer technology industry.
Political factor
The Iraq War is an ongoing war which began with a United State led invasion of Iraq in 2003. This war affected to the world economy, especially, USA who directly war with Iraq. Fear of a possible U.S. led war with Iraq soured investors’ sentiment in U.S. stock market. Furthermore, technology stocks in European market plunged following down results from sector giants Microsoft and IBM stocks fell down (CNN.com). This is because of everyone is negative on Iraq and in combination with the darkness surrounding of technology. However, IBM Company is strong enough to fight with this pressure as its revenue more than 50% is from outside U.S.
Environmental factor
All computer technology manufactures are the global companies, thus, they can