"History of competitive advantage in computer industry: cycle of consecutive competition and disruptive competition"

Computers are highly standardized and commoditized. This will make it difficult to differentiate and keep inimitability. Therefore, players in the computer industry try to gain competitive advantage in many ways. Supply chain is one of the areas where the players try to differentiate. In course of history, computers become modularized that influenced the horizontal division to change the sourcing structure in the supply chain and outsource the manufacturing to EMS which evolved to OEM and ODM business models. These are the examples of gaining competitive advantage with supply chain differentiation.
But the differentiation in the supply chain does not only help the players who found the way to compete with others but help newcomers to enter the market. The newcomers might be players who support the existing players but also might be their competitors. In case the newcomers supporting the existing players, it is likely to contribute in gaining competitive advantage in consecutive competition. In case the newcomers are their competitors especially from the outside of the market segment, it is likely to contribute in competitive advantage in disruptive competition.
This paper studied the turnovers of the leading position in the computer industry. Also tried to explain how the players changed and used the supply chain to differentiate from their competitors. By following the history of the competition, it was found that turnovers can be categorized by competition types which are consecutive and disruptive competitions. The battle field of consecutive competition is within the same computer category and mostly differentiated by the outcome of the incremental innovations. In the disruptive competition, battle field seems shifting to another segment within the industry and this segment shift is driven by the disruptive innovation.
These competitions are cycling. This paper tried to explain the mechanism learned from the history of the computer industry.