50 Years In Tech. Part 9: Mac Hopes And Troubles
by Jean-Louis Gassée
The Macintosh had a difficult birth: very late, expensive, poorly positioned. Its problems were to become my opportunity.
It’s November, 1983; I’m sitting in the auditorium at Apple’s worldwide sales meeting in Honolulu. The house lights dim and “1984” begins. Conceived by ad agency Chiat/Day, directed by Ridley Scott of Blade Runner fame, and destined to be aired nationally only once (during the 1984 Super Bowl), the minute-long movie leaves us with this message:
The lights come halfway up. Steve Jobs’ magical brainchild is lowered from the flies, deus ex Macintosh. Halfway through its descent, the Mac boots up and we hear the newborn’s wail, the now familiar Bong.
To this day I remember the electrifying effect on the audience, and troubled thoughts regarding mass persuasion — criticized on screen and, without irony, performed right in the room.
Apple’s assembled sales organization was delighted by the Mac’s enchanting presentation, its (almost) never-seen-before user interface. But there was a nervous energy under the surface: Would the Macintosh save Apple from the IBM PC and its clones?
Born in 1981, almost three years before the repeatedly delayed Mac, the 16-bit IBM PC had made mincemeat of the 8-bit Apple ][ (and of the troubled Apple ///). With the introduction of the PC XT and advent of Lotus 1–2–3 in 1983, the competitive situation had become even more severe. The XT sported an integrated hard disk, something Apple machines lacked. Lotus 1–2–3, the model for integrated software, was rightly called a “killer app” in that it displaced products such as VisiCalc and, by extension, machines such as the Apple ][ that didn’t run the new champion.
For a supposedly stodgy company, IBM’s PC marketing was surprisingly clever. They appropriated Charlie Chaplin as a mascot…
…and ran a very successful TV ad campaign that positioned their machine as the personal computer. I was stunned: They’re stealing our song!
Apple replied with cheeky “Welcome IBM” ads:
At the time, I felt this was twice mistaken. Not only did it make us sound presumptuous, but why were we spending money advertising the opposition’s ware? (I realized, later, that I was wrong about the former count: It was a good idea to position Apple as an equal — and precursor — of IBM.)
There was also Jobs’ more defiant pose, not an ad but nonetheless widely reproduced:
Good fun, probably intended to motivate Apple troops, but not necessarily endearing to prospects in conservative businesses.
Nonetheless, initial reactions to the Mac were positive. Here’s a young “Lawrence” Magid in his hot-off-the-presses review:
“I rarely get excited over a new computer. But Apple’s Macintosh, officially introduced last Tuesday, has started a fever in Silicon Valley that’s hard not to catch. My symptoms started when I talked with some devotees from Apple and the various companies that produce software, hardware and literature to enhance the new computer. By the time I got my hands on the little computer and its omni-present mouse, I was hooked. Apple has a winner.”
While the excitement was genuine, sales of the original 128k Macintosh were hobbled by its relatively high price ($2,495) and the same lack of features that hurt the Apple ][ — no hard disk, no office productivity software, no Lotus 1–2–3. Although it found favor with a few creative professionals and educators, the Mac was shunned by “Corporate America” which stuck with IBM compatible machines running Microsoft system software and apps.
By early 1985, Mac sales still weren’t taking off and sinking sales of the Apple ][ were to lead to the shutdown of the company’s Texas manufacturing plant and the company’s first-ever layoff. Something had to be done.
Having gained something of a foothold in the “creative space” and education applications, Jobs thought we could sell the French government on having a large local company such as Thomson take a license to build Macs and sell them to the education market, thus creating a success story and fatter numbers.
A bit of context is needed, here. On December 31st, 1981, President François Mitterrand offered his New Year wishes on prime time TV and decreed L’Informatique Pour Tous (Computing For Everyone), the brainchild of influential publishing family scion and visionary/author/agitator/briefly cabinet minister Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber. JJSS, as he was known, founded the weekly L’Express in 1953 and authored the strongly worded “Le Défi Americain” (The American Challenge), an essay that quickly sold 600,000 copies when it came out in 1967 — an enormous number for a political essay.
I recall how I felt when Mitterrand expressed his vision of Computing For The People: This is our pitch. And we promptly and efficiently took up the refrain. Luckily, our US masters were launching a Kids Can’t Wait marketing blitz targeting the Education market. We piggy-backed on it, called it L’Avenir N’attend Pas (The Future Can’t Wait), exploited government regulations again, and sold beaucoup Apple ][ machines as well as the color monitors we had had “made to measure” by Philips Italy. (The monitors were the idea of Michael Spindler, the recently departed and much-missed friend who was then European Marketing Chief.)
Complicated conversations with politicians, world-renowned parasites, and French industrialists went nowhere, but I got to know CEO John Sculley who had been brought in by the Apple board to provide “adult supervision” to Jobs. A talk that Sculley gave to our staff describing Apple’s future was the best business talk I had ever heard, and I told him so. I wasn’t flattering him, it was my honest feeling and my hope for the company’s coming years.
Back in the US, things were becoming tense. To counter the Mac’s perceived and real weakness in business productivity apps, Jobs came up with the concept of a Macintosh Office including a Local Area Network (LAN), a File Server (essentially a networked hard drive), and a networked laser printer. This was vintage Jobs: A grand vision supported by a spectacular demo. Unfortunately, it was only a demo.
Deploying the kremlinology that got me hired to start Apple France (see Part 5 of this series), I addressed a pair of notes to Sculley in which I dissected Jobs’ story. The Mac Office concept was never going to become a reality (I wrote), and even if the fantasy could be true, it wouldn’t solve our Corporate America market problem.
My memos were not universally well-received, to say the least, but neither was the 1985 Mac Office. (However, the LaserWriter and the AppleTalk LAN were later to become key components of Apple’s Desktop Publishing push.)
In parallel, Apple France numbers kept improving. I never forgot to recite the La Fontaine fable of the Donkey Carrying The Saints Relics (poor donkey thought the incense was for him), and with that oratory precaution taken, our numbers gave credibility to my predictions: We soon became the company’s biggest revenue and profit generator outside the US. Because of this, US management envoys made a habit of ending their European tour with the French operation as a way to shore up their morale after visiting less happy places.
Also, strange as it may seem, I was a rarity compared to most Cupertino senior execs: I had actual, repeated computer technology experience. All of the above led to an invitation to move to Cupertino in the Spring of 1985. Or, to put it another way: “Enough criticizing. If you’re so sure, why don’t you come over and help us fix things?”
I’ll get into much more detail, including my cultural mistakes, in a coming Monday Note.
— JLG@mondaynote.com
