Ten Years of Monday Notes
by Jean-Louis Gassée
The Monday Note is now ten years old. Today, a look back on the compulsion to write, and write often, about the tech industry, with much gratitude to readers and collaborators.
In 1982, after more than a year of preparations, we opened the doors of an organization that would become Apple France. At the time, Apple wasn’t well-known in Europe so what better way to welcome resellers and to strengthen Apple’s identity than to publish a weekly newsletter? All departments would contribute, not just tech and marketing, but finance, logistics, sales… Our motto: Connect, inform, argue (this was and still is France).
I corralled cartoonist Rick Erickson, an acquaintance from my Data General years, to provide graphic commentary in a style that matched my own irreverent tone. Rick watched over my shoulder as I penciled my piece in long hand, chronically late. He finished his comic while my assistant typed and edited.
Another Data General alumnus, Lucien Ruhier, was sitting downstairs, waiting for us to finish. The CEO of the printing subsidiary of a very large cheese conglomerate — lots of colorful labels, you see — Ruhier understood the logistics and routing operations we needed to print our weekly pronouncements.
The weekly newsletter was a hit. Apple France was different, we stood apart from the importers and wholesale distributers of tech goods who sent resellers reams of sell, sell, sell literature, seasonal promotions, and ingenious financing and pricing offers.
Our view was simple: Better information and support for local Apple dealers would lead to more satisfied Apple customers…and to more sales. We used to say the only real money came from customers’ pockets, not from retailers’.
It worked.
In 1985, I moved to California to run Apple’s Product Engineering at a time that the company was in crisis: Layoffs, lack of software for the Mac, Steve Jobs pushed out of the company. It didn’t help that Apple was regarded, by American resellers, as uncaring and arrogant. When I visited local dealers, I was welcomed as if I were from another planet: No one from Apple had ever made the 20 minute trip before. Resellers were “serviced” by a third party Manufacturers’ Rep organization.
Back in Cupertino I imprudently — or impudently — suggested that we publish a weekly newsletter targeted at our resellers to restore confidence and improve product information. The marketing people — professionals who had been imported from Playtex and Pepsi — told me to mind my own business. According to them, we had entered an age of commoditized products in which Marketing, not the product, was the differentiator.
I didn’t see why this should prevent us from getting closer to our dealers. I shared my views of their brains and other organs in terms that weren’t helpful. It took me a few more years to ascend to the happier state of recovering assoholic.
So there was no weekly news from Cupertino.
But, after Apple, I enjoyed writing a regular piece for MacWeek. That lasted a little less than three years, until a hospital stay at Stanford. My MacWeek writings got me an invitation to write a back-of-the-book (back cover) article for NeXT World. Steve Jobs read it and rang our door bell one Sunday morning to invite me to the 1993 “NeXTSTEP On Intel” intro at the San Francisco Civic Center where I got to sit next to Paul Jobs.
With the founding of Be Inc., I was once again able to imbibe in my newsletter mania — once we got enough of an operating system to write about (and enough money from investors). The proposal was met with the expected initial protest, particularly from engineers: We didn’t join Be to write newsletter articles. Our newsletter was edited by our polymath tech writer Doug Fulton — who now edits my Monday Notes. But just as the newsletter in France helped form a connection with Apple dealers, the Be Newsletter cemented the connection with BeOS developers, and engineers inside the company were happy (or less unhappy) to contribute. Soon, Microsoft started along the same path. (As it happened, our lead investor and member of our Board of Directors was also a Microsoft Director.)
Unfortunately, while the newsletter did something for the company’s reputation, it couldn’t forestall the end. Be was sold to Palm in 2001.
In parallel, I had started a weekly piece for Libération, in French, thanks to my friend and future Monday Note compadre Frédéric Filloux. (Once Libé’s correspondant in New York, Frédéric assumed exec positions at the newspaper before helping two European press groups move to the digital age. He’s now at Stanford, a J.S. Knight Foundation fellow.) The Libé gig lasted a little more than eight years, first on paper, then on electrons.
This brings us to the Monday Note that Frédéric and I decided to write. But why? It’s not the money, the Monday Note is free, as in both Free Speech and Free Beer. Nor is it for the promotion of a distribution business or an operating system.
In my case, I view the Monday Note as a way to find out what I really think. I have what Buddhists call “Monkey Brains”. Picture a cage filled with monkeys shrieking and jumping from bar to bar. I don’t put much trust in what I think I think. In the shower, all ideas look good. But the trouble starts when you attempt to couch them on paper. (I would continue, but the French extension of this feeble joke isn’t suitable for a family publication.)
In writing, I find constants and surprises. The persistent part is the need for an emotion without which my pen won’t work. No obligatory writing. Surprises are the good component. As I attempt to string together a coherent set of thoughts, links appear that take me in unexpected directions, or that give rise to emotions I didn’t know were lying close to the surface. One such example takes me back to the beginnings of Apple France. As we started building a distribution organization and describing its works in weekly messages, an emotion percolated from my gut and morphed into a coherent thought, one that turned out to be at the core of our success. By writing about the business I came to realize that we were not to behave as a sales company pushing boxes but as a service organization to the Apple reseller trade. Certainly, sales mattered, but they were the result of competent service to Apple dealers, not the goal itself.
This service identity was happily adopted by people who felt it created more meaning — and more money — for their lives. For a while, Apple France was the company’s largest business outside of the US.
Ever since that writing-induced realization, I look at companies from a different angle: What business is an establishment really in? Is this restaurant selling me food or …? (Danny Meyer has an answer.) Closer to the Valley, what business is an Apple Store really in? Sales or something at a higher level?
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With heartfelt thanks for readers and collaborators, Frédéric Filloux and Doug Fulton in particular, the Monday Note has been the kind of fun I aspire to.
Google will obligingly direct you to Monday Notes of the past 10 years. Actually, most of them, as I clumsily erased a few. You might enjoy my October 2011 salute to Steve Jobs and a few more light-hearted ones such as Three Slides Then Shut Up (The Art of The Pitch), or The HR-Less Performance Review, to say nothing of pieces where I amuse myself using my BS detector.
— JLG@mondaynote.com
