CIS3050 Assignment 2, Question 2

I have decided to do apply the Porter’s Value Chain Model to the company of Blizzard Entertainment. Blizzard Entertainment’s competitive strategy is to use both primary and support activities in such a way to be and maintain being one of the best computer game manufactures in the market. Blizzard Entertainment’s biggest competitors are other game manufactures like Microsoft games.

Blizzard Entertainment’s business model is based around their main game, World of Warcraft, and there two other main games Diablo, and Starcraft. These three games pretty much dominant the genre’s that they fall into like Massively Multi-Player Online, Real Time Strategy, and Dungeon Crawlers.  

Blizzard entertainment uses all the primary activities quite well. One example would be with their marketing and sales. They market there video games everywhere they think potential players will see then like online on forums or banner ads, and TV commercials. These ads and word-of-mouth have pushed all three of their main games to be some of the biggest selling games of all time.

Blizzard Entertainment’s use of information systems also really is what main them the company they are today. Their use of IS gives then competitive advantage over their competitors.  One example would be the fact that there games aren’t just released on PC but also Mac. Almost no game makers put their games out for Mac. Another use of information systems is that their game World of Warcraft if installed on a computer that is connected to the internet, in which you can download the game from their website not just from DVD, the player can play their character from it.

Blizzard Entertainment. Web. 08 Sept. 2010. <http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/>.

"Blizzard Entertainment." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Web. 09 Sept. 2010. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blizzard_Entertainment>.

CIS3050 IT Assignment 1, Question 2

My Group decided to answer question number two. Looking through the job sites it was pretty hard to actually find any job postings that listed its salary or hourly wage. I did manage to find a couple though, but our main resource was the Computer World 2010 Salary Survey.  Looking through the different jobs and the average salaries we found that they are all quite reasonable and paid pretty well.

The salaries for most all the jobs in each category (accounting, marketing, human resources, etc.) seemed to be about the same. Of course some jobs did pay more or less, but different ones seemed to be looking for differing levels of experience.   And in all categories we were surprised to see almost all the jobs had to do with IT, especially in areas like Research Triangle Park.

After getting all the information together we mostly talked about IT careers in our different fields.  Personally I am a marketing major, the only one in my group, so I did most the research on my own.  And in marketing there were a ton of different jobs available particularly in IT. They all were fairly interesting, expect for the fact that most of them weren’t permanent positions. Other people in the group saw that as a bad thing, but personally I plan on working as a consultant so the lack of permanence is exacting what I am looking for. The pay for the marketing jobs was awesome in my opinion. Even starting pay for a little experience was wonderful and with experience only went up, furthermore in some cases way up. Doing this research made me realize how much of my future field involves IT and I can’t wait to graduate and get started.

CareerBuilder.com Jobs - The Largest Job Search, Employment & Careers Site. Web. 01 Sept. 2010. <http://www.careerbuilder.com/>.

"Salary Survey 2010 - Computerworld." Computerworld - IT News, Features, Blogs, Tech Reviews, Career Advice. Web. 01 Sept. 2010. <http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9174032/Salary_Survey_2010>.