The scene is Santa Clara Valley, California, in 1976. Two Steves are busy at work in the garage. Their goal: the world’s first personal computer.
Long before IBM, Intel, and Microsoft laid the fundament for the first ”Wintel” PCs, the ambitious Steven (Paul Jobs, 21) and the tinkerer Steve (Wozniak, 26) turned their vision of a computer for the rest of us into reality.
Apple Computer’s first customers were evidently not put off by the fact that Paul Terrel’s ”Byte Shop” in Mountain View could only offer the rudimentary components for a PC, because Steve & Steve delivered models with main boards whose components were hand-soldered on.
Customers, almost all members of the fabled ”Homebrew Computer Club,” had to acquire the rest of the components on their own. In May, 1976, the Apple I was offered in the Byte Shop for $666,66. The nickname ”Apple” was Jobs’ idea, who as a student in Oregon had worked part time on the apple harvests.
The year 1977 saw the addition of a keyboard, colour display, and eight expansion slots to the system, courtesy of Wozniak. His hard work laid the fundament for story-book style growth: The two young entrepreneurs saw revenues of $7,8-million in 1978. Yet only two years later, at the time of Apple Computer’s initial public offering, sales were already $117-million strong.
Steve Jobs, unlike ”Woz,” took less interest in technical details, but more interest in the design of the devices and for a marketing strategy that, for its day, was revolutionary. ”Steve (Jobs) didn’t know much about electronics,” his partner Wozniak would later say after leaving Apple following a fight with Jobs.
It was a typical Jobs move to lure away well-known manager John Sculley from Pepsico to be president of Apple.
”If you stay at Pepsi, five years from now all you’ll have accomplished is selling a lot more sugar water to kids. If you come to Apple you can change the world,” Jobs is famously attributed as saying.
The high-rising firm thereafter suffered several downturns.
After poor performance with product introductions in the early 80s, only the introduction of the MacIntosh computer in 1984 saved Apple from the abyss. Apple also underestimated the success of the first IBM PCs that hit the market in 1981.
”I was with Apple on the day when IBM announced its PC. They weren’t interested in the news at all,” says Microsoft founder Bill Gates. ”It took them an entire year to understand what was happening there.”
Jobs and his colleagues were more taken in by the success of Apple’s development. The new computer industry was excited by the Mac’s graphic user interface that even today is the fundament for the ”man/machine interface.” The relationship between Jobs and Scully was poisoned by an economic dry spell, however. In 1985, Jobs, Apple’s last remaining co-founder, left the firm to found NeXT software.
In that same year, Sculley ignored an offer from Microsoft’s Gates to license the Mac interface and thus offer the Macintosh/Microsoft platform as the industry standard. It would turn out to be the missed chance of a lifetime.
True, Apple enjoyed success in the early 90s with its Mac Plus and the LaserWriter printer, particularly within the publishing industry. Yet Microsoft’s constant advances with its Windows system could not be stopped.
At the very latest, the introduction of Windows 95 in August 1995 established Microsoft and its Windows system as being on par with MacIntosh, even if true Mac fans dispute these even today. In 1997, Apple lagged in a deep crisis: The market share for the one-time market leader had shrunk to single figures.
Internal attempts to replace the suddenly outdated Macintosh operating system had failed. In desperation, Gilbert Amelio, the head of Apple at that time, turned to Steve Jobs to buy his firm NeXT, including its operating system, and to retrieve Jobs as an advisor to Apple. One year later, Jobs drove out Amelio and took up the position himself as Apple’s business leader.
In a surprise move, Jobs reached out to arch-enemy Bill Gates to be a partner. Gates, for his part, not only lent the distressed firm some $150-million, but also committed to developing the crucial Microsoft Office software package for the MacIntosh platform. The colourfully designed iMac computers, successful laptop
offerings, and portable entertainment devices like the iPod music player have helped Jobs lead Apple out of its crisis state.
The iMac in particular amazed even the hardest-boiled pioneers of the computer industry.
”Sometimes what Apple is doing may have an electrifying effect on the rest of us,” Intel founder Andy Grove once opined. ”It’s nothing we couldn’t have done, but Apple went ahead and did it.”
The vast mass of computer users nevertheless tend to opt for cheaper Windows PCs that have come to be the industry standard.
This fact is little changed by the experts’ accolades for the new Mac OS X operating system and for Microsoft Office for the Mac, despite an aggressive advertising campaign that is intended to move ”Wintel” users to make the switch.
It would appear that, for now at least, the Apple will be forced to fill a niche market in the creative industries, for US schools, and for users who are conscious of design and good taste. – Sapa-DPA