A porters 5 forces analysis of Microsoft Corporation Essay

A porters 5 forces analysis of Microsoft Corporation - Essay Example The following figure represents computer OS market share. Threat of new entrants is extremely high in the computer software industry. Faster product developments and technological innovations allow a new entrant to easily capture the market. The current industry trends indicate that people are highly attracted towards new software developments as they always try to replace the existing technology with more improved ones. It is obvious that a number of new market players have entered the software industry over the last two decades. However, higher entry costs reduce the threat of new market entrants to some extent. Nowadays, majority of the governments invests heavily in research and developments. Therefore, new entrants are overcoming the fund deficiency issue. Availability of substitutes raises potential threats to the Microsoft Corporation. Studies show that software design ideas are widely copied and most of the people and business are interested to use pirated software versions. According to Claburn (2011), it is expected that millions of people are using pirated Microsoft operating systems. Majority of the duplicated software provide full features to their users exactly as the original software do. Since such pirated or duplicated software are easily available at cheaper costs, many of the users are not interested to buy an original Microsoft version. Even though governments give great emphasis on the enforcement of intellectual property laws, software piracy and duplication cannot be prevented completely. While evaluating the marketing activities of Microsoft Corporation, it is clear that the firm exercises great control over its buyers (Levy, 2005). It is a known fact that Microsoft products are of supreme quality and thereby have a well market reputation. Furthermore, they are branded products. Hence, buyers