"Dynamics in PC Server Industry: Collaboration and Competition Between PC Server Manufactures and EMS"

The first personal computers (PC) was Altair 8800 release by MITS in 1974. Since then, Apple and some other manufactures followed. In 1981, IBM released IBM PC collaborating with Intel and Microsoft using Intel CPU and Microsoft Basic OS like current existing PC. Since IBM PC, PC using Intel CPU and Microsoft OS grew in the market. Microsoft Windows95 was released in 1995 and the market share of PC using Intel CPU and Microsoft OS started dominating the market and this platform was called Wintel platform.
Wintel platform standardized the interfaces of modules such as memories, disk drives, and other modules. With this standardization, many pure module manufactures, e.g. Seagate, Quantum, were established and collaborated with PC brand manufactures. On the other hand, PC brand manufactures also collaborated with electronic manufacturing service (EMS) companies to outsource their manufacturing processes which is known as vertical division. This lowered the barrier of entry and many brand manufactures, e.g. Gateway, Dell, to enter PC market. And the PC industry grew from 30M units (1992) to 250M units (2010).
This modularization also adopted in server industry as PC servers. These were also standardized with Intel platform it followed the same trajectory as PC and become vertical divided by outsourcing the part of the supply chain to EMS. The difference was that end users for PC servers, e.g. GAFA, were so large and EMS also gained the knowledge in the vertical divided supply chain, the end users and EMS started to collaborate with bypassing the brand manufactures. This caused the competition between the brand manufactures and EMC which used to collaborate.
In this study, I would like to explain the evolution of collaboration and competition in PC and PC server industry. With some insight in the current business landscape especially on collaboration to competition evolution.