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Financial Get research paper samples and course-specific study resources under homework for you course hero writing service – Manage ment Challenges, BELL FACING FRESH, business and finance Assignment: I need help writing a research paper.

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Financial
Get research paper samples and course-specific study resources under homework for you course hero writing service – Manage ment Challenges*** Original and Plagairism free work,,,Must have
plagiarism report attached!!!Introduction and conclusion paragraph is
required…Graduate level work required!!!!!
I have already attached two articles Below!!!!
The four types of markets:
perfect competition, monopolistic competition, oligopoly, and monopoly. Identify
at least two articles from the ProQuest database that highlight and
discuss two of the biggest challenges facing financial managers today
in these varied market structures. In a three- to five-page paper
(excluding title and reference pages), summarize your findings from the
articles. Include how market liquidity, competitiveness, and
efficiency impact financial managers. The paper should be formatted
according to APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center. Be
sure to properly cite your two required articles resources using APA
style.

ARTICLE ONE BELL FACING FRESH CHALLENGESPollack, Andrew.
New York Times, Late Edition (East Coast) [New York, N.Y] 28 Aug 1981: D.1.

To most people in the lower half of Manhattan, Manhattan Cable
Television is an entertainment company. But to banks and large
companies, Manhattan Cable is also a telephone company.

Those banks can use the cable, instead of New York Telephone lines, to
send data from one of their buildings to another. And if John Gault,
president of the cable company, has his way, those businesses will also
be able to use the cable to communicate by voice from one of their
buildings to another.

Manhattan Cable is at the forefront of change in the telephone business.
The last vestige of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company’s
near-monopoly – local telephone service -is being pierced.

Competetive Obstacles Fall

In the last decade, A.T.& T. has seen competition chip away at two
of its most lucrative businesses – long-distance transmission and the
provision of customer equipment such as telephones and office
switchboards. But competitors have not seriously tried to encroach upon
local phone service.

For the rewards envisioned, it was considered too great an obstacle to
try to compete with the Bell wire that has been put into nearly every
home, office and factory in America at great costs over several decades.

Now, however, a combination of new markets, new technology and rising
local phone rates are making that once-forbidding task possible. Not an
‘Assured Monopoly’

”We don’t view the local loop as being an assured monopoly anymore,”
said Tom L. Powers, executive director of network planning for Bell
Laboratories, the research arm of A.T.& T. ”Too many things are
happening and we don’t feel we can turn our back on them.”

The new competitors are:

– Cable television, which found it economical to run wires along the
streets, often hung from the phone company’s own poles, to provide
television entertainment. But now that the second wire is in every home,
some cable companies are looking at transmission of voice and data,
tasks traditionally handled by the phone company.

– Cellular radio, a new technique that will allow for a vast increase in
the number of automobile telephones. But some companies in the cellular
radio business say those same phones can be used at home, too, instead
of the wired phones.

– Digital termination systems, authorized by the Federal Communications
Commission in April, that would use microwave radio to beam data
throughout a city at high speed. Not for Casual Chats

The new competition, at least initially, will not offer any alternatives
to residential users who want to call their neighbor or the corner
drugstore. The new competitors are not looking at that market.

”That is a rotten business,” said Howard Anderson, managing director
of the Yankee Group, a Cambridge, Mass., consulting firm. ”It is a
capital-intensive business. It is a labor-intensive business. It is a
politically intensive business.” That explains why local service has
remained a monopoly for so long, Mr. Anderson said.

The competitors, at least initially, will go after high-volume business
of large corporations. In fact, to the extent that they divert this
business from the local phone company, rates for residential users might
have to be increased somewhat to compensate. Not Designed for Data

The hole in Bell’s monopoly is that its system was designed to carry
conversations, not data. Cable and radio techniques have greater
carrying capacity than the phone wires, allowing companies to send data
at high speeds from computer to computer, or extremely high-speed
facsimile. But once they provide those services, it is also easy to
provide voice service.

Among those most interested in providing or using new methods of local
telephone service are those companies that compete with Bell in the
long-distance market. Competitors such as the MCI Communications
Corporation, which provides long-distance voice transmission, are irked
by the fact that they must still rely on the local phone company for
connections at either end.

Other long-haul carriers, such as Satellite Business Systems and the
American Satellite Corporation, complain of the ”last mile” problem.
Data and voice can be beamed thousands of miles at extremely rapid
speeds, only to reach a bottleneck in the last mile at either end, in
which the data must travel over a phone line. Experimental Link Tested

This month, a major experiment was begun to test methods of
circumventing the phone company in that last mile. Major banks and
companies are transmitting data and facsimile between their New York and
San Francisco offices by satellite. In New York, the data are being
collected and distributed over cables provided by Manhattan Cable
Television. In San Francisco, the signals will be distributed by a
combination of microwave radio and cable owned by Viacom International,
which provides cable television in that city.

The equipment for the local distribution at either end will be provided
by the Local Digital Distribution Company, a joint venture of M/A-Com
Inc. and the Aetna Life and Casualty Company formed to capitalize on
what the company sees as the coming boom in local communications.

Three companies have already applied to the Federal Communications
Commission to set up digital termination services in major cities, which
would take signals from the satellite and distribute them on microwaves
beamed from a tall building to a small dish antenna on the customer’s
roof or in a window.

The companies are Satellite Business Systems; Tymshare Inc., which runs a
data communications network, and Isa Communications Services, an
Atlanta-based company run by a consortium of insurance companies.
United Telecommunications, the nation’s third-largest telephone company,
is buying a controlling interest in Isacomm. On a Collision Course

In addition to providing data communications for business, cable
television is also on a collision course with the telephone company in
providing residential service. Again at issue is data communications,
not voice.

Consumers are increasingly starting to read information, shop and bank
on home video screens connected to large computers elsewhere. Both the
phone company and some cable companies want to provide that connection.

Cable, however, has its limitations. Cable television, for instance,
will reach only about half the nation’s homes by 1990, and a smaller
percentage of those homes will be served by two-way cable, which will be
needed for information services. That leaves at least half of the
business to the phone company by default. And in most cities – Manhattan
is an exception – cables serve only residential areas and not the
downtown business areas, preventing cable companies from serving as data
communications links for corporations. A Technical Obstacle

Cable systems also are not switched systems, meaning that one person
cannot call any other person. That will severely limit the ability of
cable television to provide voice services as well as data transmission.

However, one applicant for the cable television franchise in Prince
Georges County, Md., has offered to build a switched-voice telephone
system for use by the county government and businesses. If other cable
companies, which are competing fiercely for franchises, follow that
practice, it would put the cable companies in more direct competition
with the phone company for its bread-and-butter business.

It is unclear to what extent the cable companies, which have a lucrative
business providing home entertainment, will want to engage in a clash
with the phone company to provide commercial services.

Doing that, for instance, might result in the phone company countering
by trying to get into cable television, although A.T.& T. now says
it has no intention of doing that. So far, phone companies have been
prohibited from owning cable systems in the same cities they serve. But
the F.C.C., which has already relaxed this rule for small towns, is
considering relaxing it further.

The phone company is not sitting back. Bell is up~ Hire our professional writers now and experience the best assignment help online with our custom paper writing service. We ensure your essays and assignments are expertly researched, written and delivered on time. ~ Grading its lines to
better handle digital communications and is installing, in some areas,
optical-fiber cables, which can carry as much information as
conventional television coaxial cable, if not more. Bell is aggressively
trying to move into the provision of home information services.
Cellular Radio’s Possibilities

One company that is itching to compete with the phone company is
Millicom Inc., a small New York company that sees a growing market in
cellular radio. Cellular radio is a new technique that will allow many
more mobile phones. With cellular radio, A.T.& T. estimates that in
New York City, 130,000 people could have phones in their cars, compared
with 900 now.

Millicom thinks the car phones can also be used at work or at home,
allowing a person to carry the same phone number around all day.
Especially in rural areas, where wiring distances are long, Millicom
thinks the portable phones could compete with the wired phone systems.

Most everyone else dismisses that prospect. ”If you’re starting from
scratch there would be no doubt that it would be cheaper to go with
radio,” said Carl H. Insel, vice president and general manager of the
radio products division at the E.F. Johnson Company, which makes mobile
telephones for both A.T.& T. and Millicom. But with wires already in
place, Mr. Insel said, mobile phones will not be cheap enough to
supplant the existing phone system.

In addition to the prospect of communications companies providing the
service, some large corporations are building their own local
communications facilities. The Westinghouse Electric Corporation, for
instance, is building its own private network to connect its 65
facilities in the Pittsburgh area.

Illustration

photo of cable television lineman stringing cables

Word count: 1554Copyright New York Times Company Aug 28, 1981

22 days ago

ARTICLE 2You Call This A Midlife Crisis?STEVE LOHR and JOHN MARKOFF.
New York Times, Late Edition (East Coast) [New York, N.Y] 31 Aug 2003: 3.1.

MUCH of what Microsoft has done over the last year or so might suggest a company settling into middle age.

It has overhauled its management structure, tightened its financial
controls, expanded its financial reporting, started paying dividends and
abandoned the high-tech currency of stock options in favor of risk-free
grants of shares to employees.

All the moves are sensible, pragmatic steps, but they have the feel of
concessions to an era of reduced growth and diminished expectations for
Microsoft, the premier technology growth company of the last two decades.

So, is this it? Is Microsoft’s corporate metabolism finally slowing? The senior management team at the company has a ready answer: not in your dreams.

The recent organizational and financial maneuvers, the Microsoft
executives say, are the preparations of an ambitious company on the
cusp of a new cycle of opportunity and growth. The changes in how people
work, play and communicate using digital devices of all kinds, they
say, are really just beginning, and software — especially Microsoft software — will make them happen.

”Our innovation challenge is that there’s this big opportunity to change many things,” said Bill Gates, Microsoft’s
chairman. ”The actual achievement of software in delivering benefits
to customers is, say, 20 percent of what it will be even by the end of
this decade.”

Only Microsoft,
Mr. Gates says, has the skills, money and focus to put all the software
pieces together — a concept the company calls ”integrated
innovation” — to deliver the promise of the digital world, at low
cost, to hundreds of millions of people and hundreds of thousands of
companies. It is a bold vision, and an inspiring one to those toiling at
Microsoft’s sprawling corporate campus here, outside Seattle. Yet as Mr. Gates himself observed, ”Vision is pretty cheap stuff.”

Even for a company with Microsoft’s wealth and power, the challenges are daunting. For perspective, consider a few of the similarities between I.B.M. 20 years ago and Microsoft today. In the early 1980’s, I.B.M. was emerging from a protracted antitrust battle with the Justice Department, just as Microsoft is now. Back then, I.B.M. was reaping enormous profits from its virtual monopoly in mainframe hardware and software, as Microsoft
does today from its dominant positions in personal-computer operating
systems and personal-productivity software like word processing and
spreadsheets. I.B.M. was facing emerging competition from computers using low-cost microprocessor technology. Microsoft is confronting a similar bottom-up assault from Linux, a free operating system, though one supported by rivals of Microsoft led by I.B.M.

OF course, I.B.M.,
struggled badly trying to make the transition to post-monopoly
corporate life, reluctant to abandon its old ways until it nearly
collapsed amid huge losses and layoffs in the early 1990’s, before it
turned around.

No one is predicting a similar fate for Microsoft
today, and its leaders, Mr. Gates and Steven A. Ballmer, are the main
reason. In particular, the two appear to have finally adjusted to their
new roles, with Mr. Ballmer as chief executive and Mr. Gates playing the
part of in-house technology guru.

The two men, who met as Harvard classmates, have been in business
together for 23 years. It is probably the most effective, and certainly
the most lucrative, partnership in modern corporate history. By all
accounts, including theirs, the relationship is the business equivalent
of an old marriage, tested by time and events but very solid. They have
had their differences, but they know each other’s strengths and
weaknesses, and they are united by their belief in Microsoft.

They went through a tricky transition for about 18 months, after Mr.
Gates handed the chief executive’s job to Mr. Ballmer in January 2000.
The move was made to give Mr. Gates more time to focus on technology and
product strategy, as well as the company’s legal troubles. (Those
troubles are largely behind Microsoft in the United States today, but the European Commission’s antitrust investigation continues.)

Yet Mr. Gates had been at the helm since 1975, and some old habits changed slowly. Besides, he was still Microsoft’s
chairman, chief technology strategist (officially chief software
architect) and largest shareholder. And Mr. Ballmer had to get a feel
for his new job. ”We were both kind of frustrated with each other in
terms of, well, who’s driving this car,” Mr. Gates said.

They had disagreements, company executives say, with Mr. Ballmer less enthusiastic than Mr. Gates about some of Microsoft’s
big investments in telecommunications companies and its costly plunge
into the video game business. But such differences, the executives say,
were mainly part of the give-and-take between the two, rather than any
fundamental break.

”I think they probably managed as well as you could manage it,” said John Connors, Microsoft’s
chief financial officer. ”And if you’ve been here a long time, you’re
used to seeing those guys disagree on topics in meetings.”

Jeff Raikes, a group vice president and Microsoft
veteran, offered a bit of corporate folklore by way of explanation.
Soon after Mr. Ballmer, a former assistant product manager at Procter
& Gamble, dropped out of Stanford’s M.B.A. program to join Microsoft
in 1980, he told Mr. Gates that the company ought to double its work
force, to more than 30 people, to handle all the work it had taken on.
According to Mr. Raikes, Mr. Gates replied, ”Steve, you go out and hire
one good person and then we’ll talk about the second one.”

Today, the two have settled comfortably into their roles. ”We don’t
have many rough patches,” Mr. Ballmer said in a joint interview in Mr.
Gates’s office.

Mr. Gates added, ”Yeah, we really don’t.”

They often finish each other’s sentences. They swap calendars and
scrutinize each other’s schedules, using what Mr. Gates described as
”crazy spreadsheets.”

”We have a pretty good understanding of how each other thinks,” Mr.
Gates explained. ”Steve likes to think hard about things, come in and
talk about it. I like to think about it, and send long e-mails. We get a
lot of bandwidth back and forth.”

The back-and-forth dialogue, ”bandwidth” in Microspeak, continues on
weekends. Mr. Gates will send e-mail, and Mr. Ballmer will mull it over.

”On the weekends, until about 4 p.m. on Sunday, my wife knows she loses
me because that’s when I catch up on e-mail,” Mr. Ballmer said.

Mr. Gates added: ”Steve reads e-mail on Sundays. If I see him Monday or
Tuesday, he’s really thought hard about what I said and he will either
just say, ‘Yes, I agree,’ or ‘We’re going to have to talk more about
that.’ ”

As chief software architect and chairman, Mr. Gates says he spends 60
percent of his work time on technology strategy and product reviews and
30 percent on business matters like management and budget reviews. (The
remaining 10 percent is spent on his philanthropic activities.) The
percentages were reversed, he said, when he was chief executive. He says
he misses nothing about being chief executive, adding, ”I have the
ideal job right now.”

Mr. Ballmer’s stamp on the company is increasingly evident. The changes
in management structure, compensation, financial reporting and the
effort to improve relations with customers and partners have been mainly
his handiwork. In the last year, the company has been reorganized into
seven business groups — the Windows desktop operating system, the
Office suite, server software, business software for small companies,
software for hand-held computers and cellphones, video games, and MSN,
the Internet service. Each now reports its own revenues and profits or
losses.

The goal is to decentralize decision making, and accountability, in a
company with a tradition of having the important decisions made at the
top — by Mr. Gates on technology and products, and by Mr. Ballmer on
sales and marketing.

In a company with 50,000 employees and several businesses, the
traditional structure was too top-heavy. Decisions were not being made,
and managers were frustrated, which contributed to the departures of
talented people, especially during the dot-com boom.

”In our company, too many things, I think, were just having to run
through two guys,” Mr. Raikes said. ”So that was a big point of
change.”

Mr. Ballmer led the overhaul of Microsoft’s
compensation policy. The shift from stock options to stock grants for
all employees, announced in July, has attracted most of the attention.
But another change may have greater impact on Microsoft’s
corporate culture. The company’s top 600 managers will now have their
performance-based stock awards — which can be a majority of their total
compensation — determined mainly by how well they satisfy customers,
based on surveys conducted by the company. In the past, the stock bonus
program for senior management was based on meeting sales and profit
targets.

The new policy was set in a contentious meeting of the senior managers
at a four-day retreat in February 2002 at a ski resort in Bend, Ore.

A large contingent of managers at the retreat expressed concern that the
company’s reputation as an arrogant monopoly, obsessed with its own
profits and often insensitive to customers’ needs, would hurt Microsoft in the long run, people who attended the meeting said. That is certainly not Microsoft’s image of itself, but nearly everyone at the gathering recognized the problem, people who attended said.

There was resistance to tying compensation so tightly to customer
satisfaction because it is so much more difficult to measure fairly than
sales and profits. In the end, the customer satisfaction advocates,
strongly encouraged by Mr. Ballmer, prevailed.

The Oregon session was a turning point, according to Orlando Ayala, a
senior vice president. ”We changed in that meeting,” Mr. Ayala said.
”We changed our mission as a company.”

It was part of the broader change at Microsoft as Mr. Ballmer has more and more taken charge. Inside and outside Microsoft,
there were doubts about how well he would run the company, first after
he became president in 1998, then after he became chief executive two
years later.

NO one questioned his brilliance; instead, the doubts were about whether
he would really listen to others, delegate authority and put systems in
place to decentralize a lot of the decision making. After taking over,
Mr. Ballmer spent three months talking to the top 100 technical and
product people at the company, not telling them what to do but just
listening.

”Steve has matured substantially in his C.E.O. role at Microsoft over the last five years, including the two-year transition as president,” said Craig Mundie, a senior vice president.

Brad Silverberg, a former senior executive at Microsoft, said, ”Steve transformed himself to become chief executive, and he has led an incredible transformation at Microsoft.”

And Mr. Ballmer, far more than Mr. Gates, seems suited to the industry
fence-mending needed in the aftermath of the long-running federal
antitrust case, which tarnished Microsoft’s
image by depicting the company as a bullying monopoly. Mr. Gates often
appeared to be the government’s prime target in the case, because he
wrote much of the e-mail that served as evidence. Mr. Ballmer’s name, by
contrast, rarely surfaced in the e-mail evidence. And temperamentally,
colleagues say, Mr. Ballmer is the obvious choice for striking a new
tone. ”Steve can stand up and say, I’m sorry, we have to be better
partners,” said a Microsoft manager, who asked not to be identified. ”Bill just doesn’t have that in him.”

Mr. Ballmer has his work cut out for him as Microsoft
seeks growth in new fields. The financial reporting by business group,
which began in 2002, points to the company’s quandary. The Windows and
Office desktop products are two of the most profitable large businesses
ever, with pretax profit margins of about 80 percent each. The server
software business, where Microsoft
is strong but not dominant, does well, with profit margins of about 30
percent. But the other four businesses — software for small and
medium-sized companies, software for hand-helds and cellphones, video
games and MSN — all lose money.

”The critical issue for Microsoft now is that the businesses that really matter for Microsoft
are flattening out, and nearly everything else is losing money,” said
David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard business school.

Inside the product teams at Microsoft’s
Redmond campus, however, the talk is all of nearly limitless
opportunities. ”Shame on us if we can’t innovate,” said James Allchin,
a group vice president. ”I’m up for a good competitive fight.”

Microsoft
has identified business software for small and medium-sized companies
as a market ripe for growth. The idea is to use software to make
e-commerce easy and affordable for these companies in the Internet era,
much as the electronic spreadsheet gave them a tool for financial
tracking and modeling in the personal computer era.

New versions of Microsoft’s
small-business server products will go on sale this fall, starting at
less than $1,000, including the computers from Dell, Hewlett-Packard and
others. The goal is to make Web sites, online brochures, sales, billing
and customer service as easy and automated as possible for small
businesses, with the final customization often done by the local
technology consultants who are Microsoft partners.

Today, this software business generates about $500 million a year in
revenue, but the target is a $1 billion rate a year from now. ”That is
what attracted me to this business,” said Mr. Ayala, who became the
executive in charge of the small-business software group in March.
”There are very few businesses that can grow 20 percent or 30 percent a
year. This is one. We believe this can be a $10 billion business for us
someday.”

”This is a test of the growth model,” he added.

Of course, overall annual growth for Microsoft
these days simply cannot match the 20 percent to 30 percent of the old
days. For a company that now has revenue of more than $32 billion a
year, this is largely an inevitable byproduct of the law of large
numbers. High single-digit growth, without acquisitions, would be
impressive over the long term.

The company is maturing in other ways as well. Mr. Gates and Mr. Ballmer built Microsoft
into the powerhouse of computing thanks to a corporate culture renowned
as ”hard core.” The term was long a matter of pride at Microsoft,
and it meant tireless work, aggressive competition and absolute
commitment. In the early years, there were signs of that commitment —
notably whose car was first to arrive in the parking lot in the morning
and whose car was last to leave at night.

But Mr. Gates and Mr. Ballmer, both 47, have families and other
interests now. Mr. Raikes recalled skipping a senior management meeting
one afternoon last year to attend an art show at his daughter’s
elementary school. Mr. Gates was there as well, because his daughter,
Jennifer, attends the same school. ”Hey, aren’t you supposed to be at
that meeting?” Mr. Raikes asked.

ALTHOUGH 16-hour workdays are no longer the rule, Mr. Gates and Mr.
Ballmer typically work 12-hour days, colleagues say, and sometimes
longer. One business review in January, Mr. Ballmer recalled, began at 8
a.m. and concluded at 5:30 a.m. the next day. ”I’m not sure if I’m
bragging about it,” Mr. Ballmer said. ”I’m probably apologizing for
it.”

Still, long days remain part of a work ethic that is duly noted by anyone with ambition at the company.

Asked how he would describe the Microsoft
culture today, Mr. Ballmer replied, ”I’d still say hard core works
pretty well — but I’ll put one little difference on there. Hard core
means passionate. Hard core means intense. And hard core also needs to
encompass this value we call open and respectful, which is you can be
hard core, sometimes so passionate, so excited, so over the edge that
you’re not as respectful as you need to be to other people.”

Is there any current equivalent of watching cars in the parking lot?
”If e-mail’s not turned around in reasonable speed,” Mr. Ballmer
replied, ”that’s bad form.”

Photograph

Bill Gates, left, and Steven A. Ballmer have adjusted to their new job descriptions at Microsoft. (Photo by Annie Marie Musselman for The New York Times)(pg. 1); Bill Gates, left, and Steven Ballmer, at Microsoft
in 1992, have worked together 23 years and, Mr. Gates said, know ”how
each other thinks.” (Photo by Doug Wilson/Associated Press for The New
York Times)(pg. 9)

Chart

”Three Profits, Four Losses”

Microsoft’s profits come from its three divisions that license its popular software, while its other four divisions lose money.

Microsoft’s divisions

Client

Windows operating system