Intel and its new innovation: Sustaining Competitive Advantage

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Intel has been known for the last couple of years as ‘the world's largest microprocessor company with 76.9% of the worldwide market at the end of 2005’. In addition, Intel is still moving on and is striving to fight in this competitive global market therefore came up with new innovations. The recent innovation it came with was a processor, code-named Conroe, which delivers 40% better performance while consuming 40% less power as the article mentioned.
Intel’s new innovation can be linked to Barney’s framework. In particular, Intel’s Conroe processor (Intel’s resource) enable it to respond to the environmental threats and opportunities and thus making this resource valuable. Furthermore, Intel’s Conroe processor is also rare because there are no any other competing firms who have thought of the same innovation to be brought into existence. Thus, relating to the question of rareness. Not only that, this new processor (Intel’s resource) is also difficult to imitate at least for the short run. Competing firms might try to imitate the new processor but will have some difficulties to do that because Intel believes that it, “[its] a chance of beating the competition” since it’s the only processor firm that possesses the knowledge of developing such a chip with high performance and less power. Moreover, in my opinion, I think that Intel is organized in order to exploit the full competitive potential of its new processor innovation.
By this, Intel’s new processor innovation (resource) has answered the 4 questions needed to conduct a resource based analysis of a firm’s internal strengths and weaknesses. In other words, the new processor is valuable, rare, difficult to imitate, and Intel as a firm is organized to exploit full competitive advantage. Therefore, we can conclude that Intel will have a sustained competitive advantage when the new processor will be introduced in the market.