Introduction
Starbucks agreed to a business partnership with Apple to cooperate on selling music as a core part of the coffeehouse experience. Apple included a Starbucks Entertainment part to the iTunes Store, marketing music comparable to that played in the Starbucks stores. Apple later announced that clients would be allowed to browse through the iTunes Store at Starbucks through Wi-Fi in the United States without a requirement to sign in into the Wi-Fi network. This was targeted at iPod touch, iPhone, MacBook and iPad users (Hilty, Seifert & Treibert, 2005). The iTunes Store automatically detects latest songs playing in Starbucks and offers users an opportunity to get the tracks online.
Some online stores feature LCDs with the track name, artist, and album information about the current song. This feature was started in New York City, Seattle, and the San Francisco Bay and available in various markets between 2007 and 2008. By the end of 2007, Starbucks began to vend digital downloads of some albums through the iTunes platform. Starbucks provided 37 dissimilar songs for download through iTunes as part of a package for the Song of the Day promotion. A Pick of the Week card is currently available at Starbucks for free song download. From 2011, Starbucks started providing the Pick of the Week card as an app download. The Starbucks app is accessible from the iPhone App Store .
Discussion
Apple and Starbucks struck a deal and entered into an exclusive partnership, which lets customers to wirelessly search for, preview, download and buy music from the iTunes. Through the chain’s stores, clients can access music through their iPhone, iPod touch or personal computer or Mac running iTunes when at a sharing location. A customer enters the participating location and their device automatically recognizes the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store by use of a high-speed Wi-Fi wireless set-up without hotspot login or connection fee. Customers are then able to search, browse and preview lots of songs freely, inclusive of a new “Now Playing” service that displays the title of the song live in the Starbucks at that particular moment. Customers then have an option to buy and download songs and albums straight to their devices. Selection and Prices in the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store are similar to the normal iTunes Store. The service had its debut at 600 Starbucks company-operated locations in New York and Seattle. According to Starbucks, getting access freely to the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store as well as the ‘Now Playing’ service at Starbucks is a good way of customers discovering new music (Brown, 2012).
Figure 1: Process flow for music purchase process
It is evident that Seattle-based Starbucks is an emerging technology company as much as it is a vendor of coffee. Its major push is changing on how retailers across the United States view technology and solidifies the Puget Sound district as a center of innovation. Starbucks already processes seven million in-store business transactions from the mobile payment app every week. The application has about twenty million users and incorporates a pay-by-phone option. A coffee delivery service is meant to begin sooner. With the increase in the users of the Starbucks’ computer systems, it is now easy for Apple to incorporate its strategy to the existing framework.
Apple is the company responsible for the support of the components of the infrastructure where apps such as iTunes reside. Apple Inc. is a reliable company known for its superiority in the ICT industry. The firm has a vast infrastructure that supports the operations and maintenance of its music store where music is purchased. Apple employees use the AppleLink a communications system. It has an electronic mail system, databases, and bulletin boards (Bressler, 1986). These are the techniques that are incorporated to develop the infrastructure that connects to the one in the Starbucks stores. Apple Leverage their Configuration Centre service providing to augment or wholly outsource the configuration and staging requirements. By using Apple Express as the technical partner, Starbucks has quickly got economies of scale at the same time maintaining vigorous quality control over the complete product. They work to work as an extension of their internal team consenting Starbuck to realize a unified operation designed to content all their operational needs reaching from estimated rollouts to alternative and on-demand full-time options.
Also, Starbucks is responsible for maintaining the infrastructure in its stores that support the “Now Playing” program that it owns and runs. Additionally, since Starbucks provides free internet, it is also responsible for maintaining its internet infrastructure across all its locations in order to ensure the clients wishing to download any music when at its branches can do so without interruptions. Therefore, both firms have a role to play in maintaining the appropriate infrastructure on which the business partnership resides.
Besides the IT infrastructure that Starbucks will support to enable Apple customers to seamlessly enjoy music downloads through Apple’s WiFi Music store, it will also need to maintain its branches to ensure the comfort of the clients. This is because Starbucks as a coffee-making chain has built its brand by offering great environments where clients can hang out while enjoying their coffee. Since its infrastructure is physical and relies on being where the customers are, physical security, as well as technical security, is imperative to ensure no intrusions or interruptions.
The point of failure is a point at which a process, system, or business where redundancy is and must be effected. A failure at any point in the entire system has a potential to bring that process, system, or business down. The cause of famous partnerships crippling to a point of failure is after attaining success, the partners get the opportunity and interest to take on new projects. These new projects require new objectives and missions that may eventually take the partners in diverse directions, and, therefore, the elements of the affiliation that made them fruitful end up diminishing. The biggest risk in partnership is shared liability. Each party is legally and contractually bound by the agreements the other makes. Therefore, if for instance Apple does something different that lands it in a court, they are equally liable for damages. If Starbucks, for instance, closes down, Apple is liable for all the debt it may have incurred but assuming none happens and all is well, Apple and Starbucks will still have to share the profits from the partnership (Kunitzky, 2010).
Any number of security flaws leading to data breach would be a point of failure between the two. Data Breach is one of the causes with the potential of bringing the exchange to a point stand still. Data breach is an instance for a case where protected, sensitive, or confidential data has possibly been stolen, viewed or used by an unauthorized individual. Data breaches involve personally identifiable information (PII), personal health information (PHI), intellectual property, or trade secrets. The most common perception of a data breach is an unauthorized personnel hacking into an institution network to snip sensitive information. If data breach happens to the exchange, there would be a point of failure of the business. Apple and Starbucks are some of the world’s most reliable companies. A while back, each fell victim to different and various security hacks or breaches. They both set up computer systems that appeared to have let hackers to into customers' accounts through repeatedly inputting different passwords. This procedure is commonly referred to as a brute-force attack. Reportedly, neither firm employed the tactic of automatically barring accounts after many failed attempts to enter user passwords. If this is not taken into account, and similar security flaws are exploited, the chances of the exchange to hit point of failure would be high. The result of this would be a definite seizure of the agreement that both have committed themselves into .
The partnership between Apple and Starbucks is a breeding site for conflicts. This is because both parties will want to be a chief in the partnership. This is known to be a reason for failure of many partnerships. The two companies had very good intentions of making profits and succeeding. However, those challenges appear later after the partnership has already been formed. Some of those reasons are, however, preventable though several combined initiatives. In situations where it is impossible to use such components, the single failure has less impact if an alternative component can be used instead. There is a long-term consequence of failure between the agreement struck between Apple Inc. and Starbucks. The client trust that exists between the two companies would fade away almost instantaneously. This implies that there would be a general drop in sales of the different products that apple produces and that Starbucks would lose significantly in terms of the coffee sales they do on daily basis.
The success or failure of international business exchange depends on operative business negotiations. The cost of failure is the negative consequence of partnership business failure that influences both parties (Grant, 2002). At least, failure is probable to impose a financial cost on the entrepreneurs in form of a loss or reduction in overall income. When a degree of financial cost is expected following a failure, a stimulating issue relates to the way both entrepreneurs manage and absorb the costs. Solitary the costs do not create an immediate fatal dent in a partnership, but they send up an alarm in terms of the possible forging of long-term mutual satisfaction and success in the partnership.
Conclusion
Both Apple and Starbuck should come up with techniques of sustaining their exchange for the sake of upholding the stringent customer trust that exists. It will also be a great way of retaining control of eventualities or preventing the short-term and long-term consequences that both companies would face in case of an occurrence of systems failure.
References
Apple Inc. (2007, September 5). Apple and Starbucks Announce Music Partnership. Retrieved from Apple Press Info: https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/09/05Apple-and-Starbucks-Announce-Music-Partnership.html
Bressler, S. (1986). Communications: How AppleLink Improved Apple's Information Flow. Learning Tomorrow. Journal of the Apple Education Advisory Council, 4, 125- 141.
Brown, K. (2012). Inside the Cup: Translating Starbucks into a Drinkable Language. Cork: BookBaby.
Donohue, B. (2014, January 20). Starbucks Moves Quick to Fix Application Security Vulnerability. Retrieved from Kaspersky Lab Daily: https://blog.kaspersky.com/starbucks-moves-quick-to-fix-application-security-vulnerability/
Grant, J. (2002). After image: Mind-altering marketing. London: HarperCollins Publishers.
Hilty, L. M., Seifert, E. K., & Treibert, R. (2005). Information systems for sustainable development. Hershey, PA: Idea Group Pub.
Kunitzky, Ron. (2010). Partnership Marketing. Wiley.
