Assignment #15- Apple/Napster- Question #3

When looking at the case study, it can be seen that there are two main companies talked about and looked at. The first company mentioned was Napster. We all know about this company due to their prevelance in the news in the early part of the 2000s due to their legal woes. Well after some time, the company has risen again, this time in the legitamite nature and is running operational, abiding by all laws. The organizational structure that can be seen here in the new stages of Napster could be characterized as a "funcitonal structure". This is due to the fact that the first time around they were very small. Due to this they found themselves in many tight spots due to the fact that they did not have people to specialize in certain aspects of the company. This could have been a huge problem for why they got into such leagl trouble earlier in there inception because they did not have competent people looking out for the company in the legal area. Now that they are larger, they have specific individuals set aside for certain tasks so that the company runs well and has all of its bases covered. The second company that is talked about is Apple. We can see that Apple is a company that has the organizational structure that can best be summed up as a "product structure". This is so due to the fact that they offer an array of products. They focus their products, whether it be with the personal computer area or the ipod area, to the tastes of thier consumers and feedback they get from their target market. The production of different products makes them operate with different divisions of the larger company within its whole.