Understanding Porter's Five Forces
When Porter's article was published, strategic models loved acronyms (SWOT, PEST, PESTEL, BCG Matrix, ETPS, etc.) and focused on the internal dynamics of individual companies.2
Jovo Ateljević et al. "Business Strategy and Competitive Advantage: A Reinterpretation of Michael Porter's Work," Pages 55-80. Routledge, 2023.

But, they were vague in their exploration of the competitive business environment. For instance, the opportunities and threats of SWOT analysis were too macro for many dealing with specific industry challenges.

There are several types of diabetes. The most common forms include:

Type 2 diabetes: With this type, your body doesn’t make enough insulin and/or your body’s cells don’t respond normally to the insulin (insulin resistance). This is the most common type of diabetes. It mainly affects adults, but children can have it as well.
Prediabetes: This type is the stage before Type 2 diabetes. Your blood glucose levels are higher than normal but not high enough to be officially diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.
Type 1 diabetes: This type is an autoimmune disease in which your immune system attacks and destroys insulin-producing cells in your pancreas for unknown reasons. Up to 10% of people who have diabetes have Type 1. It’s usually diagnosed in children and young adults, but it can develop at any age.
Gestational diabetes: This type develops in some people during pregnancy. Gestational diabetes usually goes away after pregnancy. However, if you have gestational diabetes, you’re at a higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes later in life.
Other types of diabetes include:

Type 3c diabetes: This form of diabetes happens when your pancreas experiences damage (other than autoimmune damage), which affects its ability to produce insulin. Pancreatitis, pancreatic cancer, cystic fibrosis and hemochromatosis can all lead to pancreas damage that causes diabetes. Having your pancreas removed (pancreatectomy) also results in Type 3c.
Latent autoimmune diabetes in adults (LADA): Like Type 1 diabetes, LADA also results from an autoimmune reaction, but it develops much more slowly than Type 1. People diagnosed with LADA are usually over the age of 30.
Maturity-onset diabetes of the young (MODY): MODY, also called monogenic diabetes, happens due to an inherited genetic mutation that affects how your body makes and uses insulin. There are currently over 10 different types of MODY. It affects up to 5% of people with diabetes and commonly runs in families.
Neonatal diabetes: This is a rare form of diabetes that occurs within the first six months of life. It’s also a form of monogenic diabetes. About 50% of babies with neonatal diabetes have the lifelong form called permanent neonatal diabetes mellitus. For the other half, the condition disappears within a few months from onset, but it can come back later in life. This is called transient neonatal diabetes mellitus.
Brittle diabetes: Brittle diabetes is a form of Type 1 diabetes that’s marked by frequent and severe episodes of high and low blood sugar levels. This instability often leads to hospitalization. In rare cases, a pancreas transplant may be necessary to permanently treat brittle diabetes.

Phase 1: Functional Testing
Before you create your first performance tests, you want to ensure that all of your application server's required functions are up and running and available, and you want to ensure that the user interface (UI) is behaving as expected.

Start by recording GUI Functional Tests to test the user's experience with the UI in an actual web browser.


Phase 2: Service Virtualization
After verifying your application server is functioning as expected, you're ready to move on to simulating some tests. BlazeMeter's Service Virtualization allow you to test even when you don't have access to a full test environment.

You can run a virtual service to deploy transactions, which are typically a subset of transactions in a particular service. Once a virtual service is created and running, you can associate it with your test, embed it in your test scripts, or provide it during test execution.


Phase 3: Performance Testing
You've verified your application server is functioning as expected, and you've virtualized some tests to get an idea of what deploying transactions against your services will look like. Now it's time to jump into real Performance Testing!

Performance Testing via the BlazeMeter cloud is how you ensure that your application server will be able to handle the full load of users performing various actions all at once as soon as your application goes live. The Performance tab will provide you with a wide range of options for testing, starting with either running a single performance test or a combination of a multiple performance tests executed simultaneously, which we refer to as a Multi-Test.

Cloud testing leverages cloud computing resources and models to enable all aspects of load testing in a highly cost-effective manner. With cloud testing, you have unlimited resources at your disposal. You can perform all Performance Testing activities in the cloud with features such as real-time reporting.


Phase 4: API Monitoring
You've verified that your application is both functioning properly and ready to perform well under load, so going forward, you'll want to keep an ever-watchful eye on your application server so as to avoid any surprise outages in the future.

Downtime can have a far-reaching impact on any business. Without proper visibility into the traffic running through your apps and infrastructure, diagnosing and solving the problem means using up valuable time and resources. BlazeMeter's API Monitoring surfaces issues directly from the internal and third-party APIs that power your apps and infrastructure.

It works by running API monitors -- either from around the globe or from within your infrastructure -- on a continuous schedule to give you visibility into API problems so you can prevent, identify and solve them fast -- before your customers notice.