Apple
Woz and Jobs
Apple started with a friendship that became a business. The business took off like a rocket, but the friendship sadly died. The two young men who founded Apple Computer first met in 1972, when Stephen Wozniak, invariably known as Woz, was 20, and Steven Jobs was 16. They had grown up in the area south of San Francisco that was to become known as Silicon Valley. Both were outsiders, with few friends or shared interests with their schoolmates and limited social skills. Woz had already dropped out of college and Jobs was to do so later.
They were fascinated by electronic circuitry, in Woz’s case to the point of obsession. From an early age he had shown an extraordinary talent for designing gadgets, and a taste for juvenile practical jokes. One of their early joint projects was a device for making free (ie illegal) phone calls. Woz produced them and Jobs sold them.
Early in 1976, mainly to impress other members of the Homebrew club of amateur electronics enthusiasts, Woz designed and built the circuitry for what was to become the first Apple computer. It was a characteristically maverick solo achievement, based on a microprocessor whose chief merit was that Woz could obtain it for $20. Like all his designs it was stunningly simple and elegant, so it could be manufactured easily and cheaply, but economics were not uppermost in Woz’s mind. He proudly gave away the schematics to other members of the club.
Steve Jobs turned out to be equally brilliant, but in very different ways. His genius was for great design and for developing and selling ideas, for getting others to share his extraordinary vision, which some later called his ‘reality distortion field’. Self-taught, he would become the most brilliant, intuitive marketer of his generation. His boundless self-belief and energy bulldozed the unworldly, reclusive Woz into turning his invention into a business.
Without each of them it would never have happened. Wozniak single-handedly designed the first two Apple computers, but it was Jobs’ drive, vision and hustling that pushed the business forward. They both liked to attempt the seemingly impossible. Woz delighted in leaving everything to the last minute and then hurling himself into frenzied bursts of creative activity, going without sleep for days on end. Yet he produced astonishingly stylish designs with fewer parts than anyone else had previously imagined. Jobs revelled in chivvying others into pursuing his dreams of perfection, in never taking no for an answer, not least from his partner. It took months of pressure to convince Woz to commit himself to the business and even longer before he would give up his modest day job at Hewlett Packard. His family also had reservations about his going into partnership with this bumptious, manipulative and none too scrupulous, youngster.
Jobs started to justify himself by winning their first big order. Their original idea was to make a hundred boards at $25 each and sell them to their fellow-hobbyists for $50. Much to their amazement the Byte Shop offered them $25,000 for 50 machines. This was the spur that made it all suddenly much more than just a sideline. Jobs’ problem then was to persuade sceptical suppliers to give them 30 days credit for the necessary parts, and to organise ‘manufacturing’. When they were thrown out of Woz’s family house, they decamped to Jobs’ parents’ home. Running out of time and money, he got his pregnant sister and friends to help with the assembly and, working day and night, they managed to fulfil the order on time. When Jobs proudly took the first ones to the Byte Shop, he discovered that the proprietor had expected fully assembled computers, with keyboards and software, not just boards. Somehow Jobs managed to bamboozle him into making payment in full.
This early success enabled Jobs to hire more people, but he soon had to borrow more money, and the business existed largely hand-to-mouth. In their first year, 1977, they only sold 150 machines. Whilst Woz’s enhancements, like a colour display that he integrated into the microprocessor, were major innovations that paved the way for a whole PC on a single board, they did not do much for immediate sales.
Jobs realised that if Apple was to survive as a business, let alone advance, it needed a new model – and to be a serious, properly financed business. If their new machine, the Apple II, was to get beyond the tiny hobbyist market, it would have to be a professionally produced and marketed product. The machine itself would need to be completely self-contained, with its own operating system, power supply and keyboard, and housed in an attractive case. As he put it subsequently, “The real jump of the Apple II was that it was a finished product. It was the first computer that you could buy that wasn’t a kit . . . You didn’t have to be a hardware hobbyist with the Apple II. That’s what the Apple was all about. “
Meeting the grown-ups
At this stage, Jobs knew little about marketing, but he had a nose for who did. He wanted Regis McKenna’s agency that was handling a stylish advertising campaign for Intel, the creator of the microprocessor. McKenna was the top PR and marketing strategist in the Valley and would normally not consider a tiny, risky start-up outfit as a client. Undeterred, Jobs made dozens of calls until he finally got them a meeting with the great man, which Woz nearly blew. When McKenna suggested that Woz avoid making a magazine article too technical, he told him he wasn’t having any PR guy mess with his copy, at which McKenna asked them to leave. Jobs managed to smooth things over, but it took a lot more phone calls to persuade McKenna to take the account.
What swung it was McKenna’s conviction that the future of electronics lay in applications aimed at non-technical customers, not raw technology. He had campaigned hard within Intel for the potential of the microprocessor and a shift in thinking towards selling devices as complete products.
McKenna was to play an important part in Apple’s early development, as was another experienced businessman he introduced to Woz and Jobs. Don Valentine was a tough venture capitalist, who had been an executive at leading semiconductor companies, and who would later fund Cisco, the maker of Internet infrastructure. Initially Valentine, like McKenna, was none too impressed by these two naïve, arrogant, scruffy kids, now working out of a garage. They did not look remotely like the kind of management team VCs liked. As he put it to McKenna, “Why did you send me these renegades from the human race?” They did not even know what a business plan was, and had no strategy at all. But he felt they had something interesting. He told them that he would consider investing if they brought in someone with marketing experience. After a week of Jobs making three or four calls a day, Valentine introduced him to a former colleague, Mike Markkula.
Markkula had been a marketing manager at Intel who had picked up several million dollars in founders’ stock. He had retired, aged 33, and was enjoying a relaxed, civilised lifestyle, which he did not intend to change too much. He had, however, long been convinced that there was soon going to be a mass-market breakthrough with microprocessors. The Apple II, he decided, could be that breakthrough, and a fascinating sideline for him. Not only would he mentor the two Steves, but he would guarantee Apple a substantial loan, reducing the immediate need for seed capital. In return he would take a third of the equity. However, Markkula was not interested in running the company. He would be the chairman and advise on marketing. He persuaded another old friend from the semiconductor industry, Mike Scott, to become president and effective CEO.
Scott was a tough, hands-on manager of manufacturing operations, someone who made things happen. Jobs was always ambivalent towards him, but knew that he was not yet ready for the top job. As Scott owned much less stock than the other three principals, the dynamics were always rather strange. Jobs, as heir apparent, felt free to get involved in any aspect of the business, and nibbled constantly at Scott’s authority. His main role was achieving distribution and evangelising, both of which he did brilliantly, ensuring that the Apple II had what was then the best distribution system in the young PC industry. Tensions however were frequent.
Scott respected Job’s vision and intellect: “The great thing about Jobs was that you always understood where you stood with him. He never said what you wanted to hear. His positions were well thought out, and he always told you where he was coming from. It could be very stressful, but the trick was not to take it personally”. However, it was also clear that “he cannot run anything. He doesn’t know how to manage people. After you get something started he causes lots of waves. He likes to fly around like a hummingbird at ninety miles per hour. He needs to be sat on”.
This was the view of most people who worked with Jobs – apart from those who simply adored or loathed him. Although Jobs’ vision and charisma were inspirational, he was cordially disliked by many engineers for his arrogance, insensitivity and passing off of other people’s ideas as his own. On the other hand, his intuition and business judgment were often excellent. Scott thought that the 90 days warranty standard in the electronics industry would be good enough for personal computers. Jobs argued passionately that a year would be needed to build trust with customers. After bursting into tears, he finally won the argument. It was also Jobs who insisted that owners of earlier models should be able to upgrade to new ones.
Initially though, Scott’s biggest problem was Woz. The priority was to produce a new model that could sell by the thousand, and they were totally dependent on Woz to complete the design of the Apple II. “Woz was very, very creative, but it came in spurts. And he would cover himself during the in-between times. He’d never say that he wasn’t making progress on a project. Instead, he’d say everything was coming along just fine, and meanwhile he would be waiting for the little light in his brain to switch on and save him”.
Woz was the idol of the technological buffs, particularly the many talented engineers who joined Apple, and created, virtually single-handed, the first two Apple computers. He was not just a brilliant designer of elegant circuitry – he also wrote a new programming language for the Apple II. Knowing nothing about disk drives, he designed a completely new approach to the interface. Ignoring the work of dozens of IBM engineers on synchronicity, Woz dispensed with the problem by simply holding data in a cache. His overall design for the Apple II, with an unheard-of 62 chips on the board, was applauded by the entire industry as an engineering masterpiece. California magazine proclaimed him “King of the Nerds”.
The techie view of Jobs, shared to some extent by Woz and by many commentators repelled by his often appalling behaviour, was that he was a parasite on the real inventors – his main contribution to the Apple II being its elegant design and casing. With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that his role was infinitely more important. Jobs imprinted his personality on Apple and its products like a Hollywood producer, with monumental ego and screaming tantrums to match. He gave the company its stylish, hip, rebellious image. His passion for great design and his perfectionism can be seen in virtually every Apple product in which he had a hand. He was obsessed with how customers would see the product and feel about it. The engineers who did more of the supposedly real, work resented his appropriation of their creations, but there seems little doubt that in his irritating gadfly way, he inspired Apple to produce “insanely great” products.
McKenna carefully burnished the image of Jobs as the personification of Apple, set out to create a climate of approval in the press and amongst opinion-formers and secured the approbation of Benjamin Rosen, the author of an influential newsletter. Apple’s external audience rapidly became that of young professionals who were more interested in how easy the computers were to use than their technical wizardry. They loved the coolness of Apple products and identified with Jobs.
However the person who actually built the organisation, created the administrative, manufacturing and financial infrastructure, and ensured that products got out of the door was Mike Scott, who imposed a modicum of order on Apple’s often chaotic culture. Valentine, never lavish in his praise, called it one of the best pieces of execution he’d ever witnessed.
The Perils of Stardom
Launched in 1977, the Apple II was the company’s greatest commercial success until the arrival of the i-pod more than 20 years later. By 1978 it had become the leading personal computer in a market until then made up mostly of hobbyists. In its first year Apple sold 8,800, in the next, 35,000, and by 1980, 70,000, taking Apple’s revenues to $118 million. It was Apple’s cash cow for most of the 1980s, selling over 2 million.
Its take-off was considerably helped by the appearance in 1979 of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program, produced by a small software developer. This gave the first, tentative business customers a reason for buying one of these strange new toys. Spreadsheets were not just aids to preparing budgets and business plans, but dynamic models that could almost instantly show the effect of changes, which previously would have taken hours of laborious calculations. VisiCalc was also the first serious personal computer software designed for non-engineers. Ther were soon hundreds of independent software developers, producing a library of programs to complement the Apple II.
Another organisation was to have an even more decisive influence on Apple’s future – and on how we all use computers. In 1979 Jobs visited Xerox’s legendary research centre, PARC, and what he saw there “blew his mind”. PARC had developed some concepts for personal computing – a ‘graphical user interface’, icons and the mouse – that we now all take for granted. These were far too strange for Xerox’s management to pursue, but Jobs saw at once that they could transform how people used computers. Apple signed a licensing agreement with PARC and subsequently recruited several of its people.
The concepts were first incorporated into Apple’s most ambitious new product development project, the Lisa, which Jobs championed personally. No fewer than three other, soon rival, projects were initiated in 1979, when Apple spent $7 million on research and development. It bumped this up to $21 million in 1980, and $38 million in 1981. Jobs however had eyes only for Lisa, and took to loudly disparaging the other teams, notably that of the II.
The Apple III was rushed out hurriedly in 1980. Intended as the successor to the Apple II, it was severely limited by the need to use the same Motorola processor and to be able to run all the software used on Apple II. There were big conflicts between marketing and engineering and major compromises on quality and reliability. It was Apple’s first failure.
Fortunately, it attracted comparatively little public attention. The triumphant success of the Apple II and the enormous media interest in the new young company led directly to an early stock market flotation. Valentine had previously organised some private placements of capital and sold his own stake for a large profit in August 1980. The Initial Private Offering (IPO) in December 1980 was the most oversubscribed in twenty years. In August the stock had been valued at $5.44, but on 12 December it opened at $22 and closed the day at $29. The company, which had only been incorporated three years earlier, was valued at more than a billion dollars. Over a hundred of the now 1,000 employees became millionaires overnight.
The excitement leading up to the IPO, and the euphoria after it, went to many people’s heads and contributed directly to some of Apple’s subsequent misfortunes. Its timing had dictated the rushed launch of the Apple III earlier in 1980. It was quickly followed by some disastrous decisions, and the loss of Woz and Scott.
Most of the new millionaires satisfied themselves with buying a Mercedes or a Porsche, but Woz was one of those who decided on a plane. In February 1981, before he had obtained his full pilot’s licence, he crashed it and was in a coma for a week. He did not come back to work for nearly three years, and never produced another computer for Apple.
It was also clear by now that the Apple III had been a disaster. Scott decided that heads must roll. He was probably right to conclude that Apple had acquired too many people in its headlong expansion and had got into sloppy ways, but his handling of the purge grated badly. He first demanded 80 dismissals, including the head of engineering. His colleagues baulked at this, but finally agreed on 40. Black Wednesday caused almost universal outrage – Apple was not supposed to be that kind of company and Scott became intensely unpopular. A month later, while he was away on a long weekend break, Markkula, Jobs and other senior managers took what was probably a worse decision – to fire Scott himself. Markkula took over as nominal CEO, but much of the power was now with the 25 year-old chairman. The children had revolted against the grown-ups and turned their backs on disciplined management.
This kind of coup was to become a pattern at Apple for the next 16 years. Every subsequent leader, from Jobs himself in 1985 to Amelio in 1997, was ousted in similar fashion following plots by their closest colleagues. Most of the firings were justified, but they never produced better leaders. On each occasion Apple failed to find a truly professional CEO with a coherent strategy for the company and the ability to get it to pull together. Scott may not have been the man to lead Apple to the next stage but neither were any of his successors until the return of the older, wiser Jobs in 1997.
Many years later, McKenna acknowledged that the defenestration of Scott had been a terrible mistake:
“Mike Scott was a tough and demanding boss. But he was also intent on putting some sort of systematic decision-making process into place at Apple. And Apple got rid of him. Looking back, he was Apple’s last chance to institute some kind of order. After that, the culture became so overwhelming that even the toughest manager would come in to shake things up – and instead find himself two months later lounging on a beanbag. . . . The mistake everyone makes is assuming that Apple is a real company. But it is not. It never has been.”
Markkula and Jobs however were so pumped up by the success of the IPO and all the adulation the company was receiving that they took another terrible decision. They decided that all these third party developers were parasites making money out of Apple’s brilliant innovations. Instead of recognising that the relationship was genuinely symbiotic, they decided to discourage the parasites. Apple would from now on try to produce everything it could itself, starting with its own spreadsheet program, and moving on to disk drives and keyboards.
Fortunately Apple was not consistent about this, and later actively recruited developers for the Mac, but it gradually lost much of the army of independent developers that had played such a big part in making the Apple II so attractive to customers, and was one of its most valuable assets. (A much larger army would soon do the same for the PC.) Trying to do everything in-house added yet more to Apple’s rising costs, since it could never be the most efficient producer of every component. Most dangerously of all, it reinforced the belief that nobody outside the company could do anything better than Apple.
Big brother
For its first four years, Apple had faced little serious competition. All the other personal computer makers made machines that for non-technical professional users were not real alternatives to the Apple II. This brief and entirely atypical period fostered the dangerous illusion of invincibility.
The arrival of IBM in the PC market in 1981, with its enormous financial and marketing muscle, changed everything. Apple cheekily ran a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal saying, “Welcome IBM. Seriously.” Privately it scoffed at the ordinariness of the new PC. Bill Gates was visiting Apple when the PC was announced and remarked that “they didn’t seem to care. It took them a year to realise what had happened.”
It was IBM who opened up the corporate market. It sold 240,000 PCs in 1982, and in 1983, with the more powerful XT in its portfolio, 800,000. This meant it had displaced Apple as the leader, though in reality the two companies were addressing different markets. IBM had the best sales force, the greatest reputation, the closest relationships with its customers of any company in any industry, not just computing. It was at the peak of its powers – nobody then foresaw its abrupt decline a few years later. All that Apple had were some nice products and early adopter customers. Its zaniness and anti-corporate attitudes, whilst good for its image amongst the young at heart, positively repelled organisations dubious about the very idea of purchasing PCs at all. IBM represented security and reliability.
For Apple, IBM represented the bad old corporate world that it was going to topple. As its own sales topped a billion dollars in 1983 and profits reached $79 million, it was still riding on the crest of a wave. It had not the slightest doubt that its brilliantly designed products would prevail over dull mediocrity and conformism and the main weapon with which to defeat Big Brother would be the flagship product it had been working on since 1979, the Lisa.
The Lisa was undoubtedly an immensely innovative machine, the precursor to the powerful workstations that Silicon Graphics and Apollo were soon to produce – but for engineers, not businessmen. The problem with the Lisa was that it was like a Ferrari in a market of Model-T Fords. Computer buffs and aesthetes loved it, but for corporations it was too unusual and at a minimum price of $10,000, far too expensive. It flopped badly and Apple’s profits in the quarter to September 1983 slumped from $25 million to $5 million.
Fortunately it seemed that a new champion was at hand, and one that was now Jobs’ own baby.
A dent in the universe
The Mac had initially been developed on the fringes of Apple. Its original creator was Jeff Raskin, another technical genius, whom even Woz acknowledged as a peer. Raskin had long dreamed of a computer as “an indispensable companion”, as easy to use and as inexpensive as a Swiss Army pen-knife, a People’s Computer. Sadly for Raskin, Jobs, who had previously disdained the Mac, became a convert after he had been pushed off the Lisa team. The Mac, he realised, could be the Apple II of the 1980s. He worked his way into the development team and soon worked Raskin out.
His vision for the Mac was more ambitious and owed not a little to his earlier dreams for the Lisa. The Mac “would make a dent in the universe” and be acclaimed as a superb piece of design. However egotistically Jobs may have behaved, there is no doubt that it was his leadership that made the Mac the product it became, more powerful than Raskin had intended (though not enough) and incorporating the first mouse. His juvenile slogan, “it’s better to be a pirate than join the navy” struck a chord with most of the team and working on the Mac was the most intense, traumatic and exhilarating experience most of them ever had. They thought of themselves, with some justification, as artists. John Sculley remarked later: “It was almost as if there were magnetic fields, some spiritual force, mesmerising people. Their eyes were just dazed. Excitement showed on everyone’s face. It was nearly a cult experience.”
The Macintosh was a truly outstanding creation, worthy of its appearance in the Museum of Modern Art. It was announced with one of the most arresting television commercials ever seen, directed by Ridley Scott, the creator of ‘Blade Runner’. Shown only once, in January 1984 in the middle of the Superbowl, it depicted a thinly-disguised IBM as the soulless, totalitarian Big Brother of Orwell’s novel, proclaiming “the unification of thought” to the massed ranks of grey, sleepwalking prisoners. Suddenly a dashing young woman runs through their ranks, throws a hammer at the screen and smashes it. “On January 24, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. 1984 won’t be like 1984.” Quite what this meant was not clear to everyone who saw the ad, but it certainly caught their attention, and was re-played countless times on other programmes.
Two days later at the official launch, Jobs added his own dramatic flourishes:
“It is now 1984. It appears that IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the only hope to offer IBM a run for its money. Dealers, initially welcoming IBM with open arms, now fear an IBM-dominated and controlled future. They are increasingly turning back to Apple as the only force that can ensure their future freedom
“IBM wants it all and is aiming its guns on its last obstacle to industry control, Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry, the entire information age? Was George Orwell right?”
To massed shouts of “No” and the strains of ‘Chariots of Fire’, he unveiled the Mac.
The Macintosh was completely different from any PC that most people had ever seen. It embodied ideas that visionaries like Douglas Engelbart had expressed in the 1960s for a machine “for the augmentation of man’s intellect”, complete with the now familiar mouse and windows. The Mac was the first real product inspired by the prototypes that the engineers at Xerox’s PARC centre had been developing for years. Its graphical operating system was breathtakingly intuitive and user-friendly. It was to be another eleven years before ordinary PCs had a desktop interface that was comparable, when Windows 95 finally arrived, incorporating many features from the Mac operating system. Everyone who played with the Mac fell in love with it – including Bill Gates.
Unfortunately, not nearly enough people bought it. Sales for the year were 250,000, only half of the target Jobs had boldly set, and a sixth of the number of PCs IBM sold in 1984. For the corporate market, the Mac was too expensive, initially not powerful enough, with woefully inadequate memory, no hard disc and a feeble software library. Most of these flaws had been pointed out before, but Jobs was adamant that it was ready. As his lieutenant, Bill Atkinson acknowledged later, “ In our efforts to change the world we were a little arrogant and unwilling to listen”.
Over the next two years, the problems were gradually fixed and subsequent versions of the Mac attracted passionate devotion from its users. However, the cult that developed around it pointed to a strategic weakness for a product aimed at knowledge workers: it was simply too different, too quirky to appeal to a mass market quickly. It was a great product for early adopter consumers who could afford it and for niches like desktop publishing and education, but not remotely appropriate for taking on IBM and winning corporate customers. It seemed to IT managers more like a toy than a real man’s machine.
Apple took a long time to recognise both this and the fact that selling to businesses was about a lot more than having great products. By 1984 there were more than a hundred manufacturers of clone PCs, most of them slashing their prices every few months, as Moore’s Law kicked in. The vast majority never made a profit and quickly disappeared. Soon, not only was IBM itself to be eclipsed by Compaq, Hitachi and the rest of the pack, but Apple was up against a vast new, low-cost industry. Its chief adversary however became the owner of the operating system on all these new machines, Microsoft. The ever-growing number of people and organisations using first DOS, then its successor, Windows, and the number of developers producing software for the new standard, represented a tide of network effects that was irresistible.
The fact that the Mac’s operating system was vastly more user-friendly than DOS and Windows counted for little. It was becoming the Betamax of the computing industry, stuck with the discriminating early adopters, but missing out, not just on the corporate market but also on the emerging mass consumer market. DOS and then Windows were the dominant standard, just as VHS had become in videocassettes.
For Apple to penetrate corporate markets, it would have needed either to build new capabilities or to form a partnership with someone who had them. The alternative, and more realistic, strategy was to concentrate on markets where it had real competitive advantage. Instead it spent years fighting an un-winnable war, first against the most powerful corporation in the world, then against the most formidable strategist of the information age, Bill Gates, and most hopelessly of all against the overwhelming momentum that developed behind ever-cheaper PCs.
Nobody anticipated at the time how much the PC market and industry structure would evolve, but McKenna gave Apple some sensible advice: “You need to make a decision. Whether you want to be a Sony or an IBM. You can’t be both. . . You have to decide what company you want to be. This path (corporate) goes towards systems, and systems are different things than stand-alone computers. They need heavy support, infrastructure. You can’t just sell things. If you want to sell things, then go the other way. Be like Sony . . . But you’ve got to decide.”
It would take Apple another 15 years finally to decide what kind of company it would be, and indeed could be, but in the mid-1980s it wanted to have it all, to dominate both corporate and consumer markets.
The Dauphin de-throned
It was during this critical period that there was a protracted, disastrous regime change. Markkula and Jobs had known since they fired Scott that they needed a real CEO. Their first choice was Don Estridge, who had brilliantly championed the PC at IBM. Estridge turned them down. He had no desire to leave the company he regarded as the best in the world, least of all to work with Jobs. They then went to Heidrick & Struggles, the leading head-hunters, with a curious set of requirements: they wanted an experienced CEO with consumer marketing experience, who was ‘interested in’ high tech, would serve as a mentor to Jobs, adjust quickly to the Apple culture and act as a visionary in the industry. What self-respecting CEO would want to be a mentor to the heir-apparent, particularly one as capricious as Jobs? How could someone without anything more than an interest in computers be a visionary? Conspicuous by their absence in the specification were the strategic ability to chart a course in constantly changing terrain, a thorough understanding of technology, or strong leadership qualities.
Apple unfortunately was to get exactly what it asked for, a marketing tactician with little knowledge or understanding of the new industry, but one rather taken with the idea of being a visionary. After several top executives had predictably declined Heidrick & Struggles’ approaches, the one big name that remained in consideration was John Sculley, President of Pepsi. Sculley’s experience was entirely in consumer marketing in a mature industry, where he had been very successful at climbing the corporate ladder and in winning market share from Coca Cola. However, he had no experience of devising and launching genuinely new products or of selling to corporations, and knew next to nothing about computers. He was also distinctly uncharismatic.
Jobs brushed aside these objections: “What we’re doing has never been done before. We’re trying to build a totally different kind of company, and we need really great people . . . My dream is that every person in the world will have their own Apple computer. To do that, we’ve got to be a great marketing company”.
This was classic Jobs hot air, which he almost certainly believed at the time. Not only was the dream unattainable, but if Apple were going to attack the corporate market the marketing skills needed would be business-to-business. Sculley, however, as his autobiography was to reveal, believed himself to be a marketing genius. Jobs courted him fervently, closing the deal with the irresistible line, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world”.
Sculley, having secured a financial package that made him the best-paid executive in Silicon Valley, accepted. At his first public appearance in 1983 he unctuously declared, “If you can pick one reason why I came to Apple, it was to have the chance to work with Steve. I look on him as being one of the really important figures in our country in this century. And I have the chance to help him grow”.
Deliberately or not, Jobs had got himself a mentor he could dominate. For much of the next year he largely got his own way, and the two indulged in frequent public displays of mutual admiration. Sculley himself was happy to employ the prevailing Apple rhetoric – “leveraging Apple’s critical mass” and “selling a total systems environment” – without questioning too closely what any of it really meant.
Privately however he was dismayed by the “many competitive fiefdoms” he discovered. When Business Week ran a story saying that IBM had won the PC race, he was struck by the fact that nobody in Apple took much notice. “Apple people didn’t really read business magazines. So absorbed in what they were doing at the company, many had no touch with the outside world”.
At an early stage he raised the legitimate question of whether Apple shouldn’t consider bringing out a product that was compatible with the new IBM standard. This heresy was quickly overwhelmed by a torrent of counter-arguments and he did not have the technical knowledge to sustain the debate. Jobs ended it by declaring categorically that Apple was all about being different. “Compatibility is the noose around creativity”. Sculley went back to being a mentor, though he seemed to be doing more of the learning than Jobs.
One useful thing that the CEO did manage to do in these tentative early months was to restore some of the battered morale of the Apple II team. Starved of resources and regularly berated by Jobs as bozos, they were bitterly angry. Sculley made himself the head of the division, increased the advertising budget, cut prices and offered dealers new incentives. In December 1983, the II had its best ever month and saved the company from the disaster of the Lisa: 110,000 were sold, helping overall revenues reach $1.5 billion. The II was to continue to outsell the Mac for some years to come.
Sculley’s contribution to the launch of the Mac was less fortunate. Raskin had originally had in mind a price of $995 for his People’s Computer. Jobs and his team had decided their Mac should sell at $1,995. Sculley believed that new products should be priced high to skim the market and recover development costs. He insisted at the last minute that it should be $2,495. This made the Mac a premium product – one that everyone liked to play with, but few could justify buying.
As the scale of the sales challenge in 1984 became clear, Jobs’ behaviour became ever more erratic. He launched himself into a frenzied promotional campaign, flying around the country to demonstrate Macs to people like Mick Jagger and Andy Warhol. In a further flight from reality, he devoted an enormous amount of time and more than $5 million to the production of what he declared would be the greatest annual report of all time, with endorsements from Ted Turner, Kurt Vonnegut, and Stephen Sondheim. Apple’s advertising budget, which had been $4 million in 1983, reached $100 million. Much of it was brilliant and stylish, but a disastrous TV ad showed businessmen as lemmings walking blindfold over the edge of a cliff. This insult to IT managers, the customers Apple needed to win over, was resented for a long time.
For some months, nobody dared to tell Jobs the real sales numbers, continuing to use estimates made in January. Senior executives who questioned the figures were removed. Yet by October, when it was clear that sales were massively short of target, Sculley meekly accepted Jobs’ business plan that predicted a million Mac sales in 1985 – four times higher than those for 1984 – and a doubling of company revenues to $3 billion.
As the real sales figures emerged, depression spread throughout the Mac team, and many of its key members left the company. Woz himself, furious at the constant disparagement of the Apple II team, resigned angrily in February 1985, declaring that “Apple’s direction has been horrendously wrong for years”. Sculley finally plucked up the courage to confront Jobs. In April, with financial disaster looming, the board gave Sculley the authority to act like a real CEO and decided that Jobs should be removed from the Mac division.
Jobs’ reaction was to plan a coup against Sculley. This was not an entirely ludicrous idea. The CEO was clearly no more up to the task of leading Apple than Jobs, but he was a more astute politician. Presented with evidence of the plot, he immediately challenged Jobs. At a meeting of top executives, he forced them to choose between him and Jobs. Jobs pointed out what many suspected but dared not acknowledge, that Sculley was completely out of his depth. Nevertheless, faced with the alternative of the devil they knew only too well, everyone, including Regis McKenna, voted for Sculley.
Jobs hung around for a few more months in brooding semi-exile. He then announced that he was leaving the company to start NeXT, taking with him several Apple people, and selling all but one of his shares in Apple. As NeXT aimed to produce what was effectively a top-of the range workstation for the education market, it would compete directly with Apple. This looked to all concerned like a final parting.
The Trojan niche
Sculley’s immediate task was to deal with the financial crisis. This was due, not just to the Mac’s failure to penetrate business markets, but to a general slump in demand for personal computers. In June 1985, he laid off 1,200 people, a fifth of Apple’s workforce. Apple’s direct salesforce disappeared almost entirely. At the same time, Apple announced its first quarterly loss – of $17 million, but by the end of the year, with Apple’s highest ever quarterly earnings. the crisis appeared to be over,
Sculley’s priorities, now that he was free at last from Apple’s sacred monster, were to make the company an orderly, marketing-led operation and to maximise profitability. In this he had some success, ending the civil war between the Apple II and Mac divisions, supervising the roll-out of urgently needed extensions to the Mac range, and seeking every opportunity to improve margins. “The heroic style – the lone cowboy on horseback – is not the figure we worship anymore at Apple. . . Apple is a more disciplined, grown-up company today. People have grown to recognise that discipline is not a threat to innovation . . . I know what it takes to be a success”.
Although not acknowledged explicitly, Apple was gradually but significantly modifying its strategy. In 1984 Jobs and Sculley had articulated a new mission statement: “Produce high-quality, low cost, easy to use products that incorporate high technology for the individual. We are proving that high technology does not have to be intimidating for non-computer experts.”
Implicit in this and in the winding down of the sales force was concentrating on consumer and professional markets, where it was making some headway. The Apple II had always done well amongst schools, but the Mac discovered a vital new market thanks to three innovative products, only one of which originated within Apple itself. The critical one was Pagemaker , the creation of Paul Brainerd,. He had realised that PCs would one day be capable of doing the design and layout for newspapers that then required immensely expensive machines. When he discovered the Mac, he could see at once that it was ideally suited – it was infinitely easier to use than PCs, already had graphical capabilities and it was the only computer where the screen display was the same as what appeared on the printed page – What You See Is What You Get.
Pagemaker was complemented by Laser Writer, a printer that actually incorporated a computer, but one with more memory that the Mac, and which ran much faster. Most people in Apple had thought that customers would balk at paying $7,000 for a peripheral device, but Jobs had seen its potential. His really smart move though was to buy a stake in a company called Adobe, which had produced another stunning innovation that made use of LaserWriter. PostScript was a page description language for printers, developed by John Warner, an alumnus of Xerox PARC and the founder of Adobe. PostScript, amongst other things, made it easy to use many different typefaces and fonts. It transformed the way documents are produced and was the forerunner of the now ubiquitous Adobe Acrobat.
The incorporation of these three with the Mac produced the revolution known as desk-top publishing, where Macintosh remains the standard platform today. Like the spreadsheet, Pagemaker’s real value lay in its ability to model – suddenly it became incredibly easy to try out different layouts. What had once taken hours of work against tight deadlines could now be done in a flash. This would transform newspaper publishing iand enabled virtually anybody to become a publisher on a modest scale.
Sculley could see that Pagemaker would be a brilliant way of differentiating the Mac, and Apple supported its launch. As publicity departments started to buy Macs to produce elegant documents in-house, other parts of the organisation started to place orders – it became known as the Trojan niche. These sales were not enough to halt the ever-rising market share of DOS-based machines, but they did help to save the Macintosh, and hence Apple, as sales of the Apple II finally started to fall off. Customers who bought Macs to use Pagemaker were happy to pay a premium, but most others were not.
There was a steady roll-out of versions that rectified the deficiencies of the 1984 model. The more powerful Mac Plus came out in 1986 and the Mac II in 1987 was an even greater advance, described by its 28 year-old developer, Mike Dhuey, as “a market-driven Mac, rather than what we wanted for ourselves”. By 1990, the Mac family included a low-cost model, the Classic, that realised Jeff Raskin’s dream of a Swiss Army penknife computer, selling at $1,000, and in 1991, there was finally a laptop version, generally acknowledged to be the best on the market.
For three years sales grew at an annual rate of over 40% from $1.9 billion in 1986 to $5.3 billion in 1989. It had taken five years to sell the first million Macs, but in the next five years, ten million would be sold. The product had clearly established itself, but in 1990 sales stopped growing and it became clear that the company was in big trouble.
Decline and Drift
The immediate cause of the problems was pricing. For most customers the difference in cost between ever-more affordable IBM clones and what had once been called the People’s Computer, but was now downright expensive, was simply too great to justify. Pricing however was part of a wider strategic muddle. Sculley simply did not understand the dynamics of the industry and had no strategy for dealing with a constantly changing marketplace. If the personal computer market had been a stable, predictable one like soft drinks, his segmented approach aimed at maximising margins, would have made sense. But in a market that was in constant flux it became an artificial exercise that was nearly always out of date.
In the short-term, facing no direct competition, Apple was able to raise prices and improve profitability without introducing exciting new products. This made Sculley popular with the stock market and boosted the share price. Strategically however, it accentuated Apple’s marginalisation from the main PC marketplace, as its overall share got smaller and smaller. In the eyes of Apple true believers he did something far worse – he squeezed the soul out of the company and made it dull.
Apple’s top management team contained few serious, practical technologists: Sculley preferred to surround himself with marketing and finance professionals. However, he shuffled them around constantly, and anyone who began to look like an heir apparent quickly disappeared. Many of the most talented people, like Bill Campbell, who had made a real success of Claris, Apple’s semi-autonomous software developer, departed in disgust. There was a major exodus of engineers to the emerging workstation industry, the successor to the Lisa. Apple itself had nothing that could compete with the products of Silicon Graphics and Sun, so that new market was closed to it.
Sculley had been caught by Regis McKenna’s curse of the beanbag. He was captivated by the idea of revolutionary new products and of himself as a technological visionary. His big idea, to which he devoted considerable energy, was a hazy concept called the Dynabook or Knowledge Navigator. This would be: “a discoverer of worlds, a tool as galvanising as the printing press. Individuals could use it to drive through libraries, museums, databases or institutional archives. . . .converting vast quantities of information into personalised and understandable knowledge.”
Such a device of course still does not exist, though the Internet now provides many of the elements. There was nothing wrong with the ideas, as daydreams, but they had little to contribute to the strategic challenges facing Apple – ferocious competition from IBM PC clones and steady marginalisation. By 1990 Windows had incorporated many of the features that had made the Mac OS so distinctive. The Mac’s share of the overall market was now less than 10%, and was to fall much lower. By 1993 Microsoft had sold 10 million copies of Windows.
Sculley compounded his failings by talking publicly about his ‘visions’ as if they were something that might result in real Apple products. He even got George Lucas to help him make some documentaries about them. This generated good media coverage initially but little respect in Silicon Valley. When Sculley announced in 1990 that he was now Apple’s Chief Technology Officer, he made himself a laughing stock. In 1993, he launched the Newton with an enormous build-up of publicity. This ‘Personal Digital Assistant’ sounded to many like a Dynabook, but its capabilities were so feeble that not only did it flop in the marketplace, but almost ruined Apple’s reputation as an exciting innovator.
The Newton was the final nail in Sculley’s coffin. After a slump in the share price, the board fired him.
Renaissance
It would be tedious to relate Apple’s history over the next few dismal years under Sculley’s successors, Mike Spindler and Gil Amelio, when sales were static at best, profits non-existent and morale rock-bottom. Although Amelio did a lot to clean up Apple’s finances and initiate new product ideas, to most Apple watchers and insiders it looked as if the end was nigh. As an act of apparent desperation in 1997 the board turned to the former enfant terrible, and invited the infuriating, but extraordinarily gifted Mr Jobs to come back as an advisor.
In the twelve years he had been absent, Jobs had matured considerably. He had made an enormous success of Pixar, his computer animation company. With hits like Toy Story, it had made him a movie mogul and was later to be sold to Disney for $7.4 billion. His computer company, NeXT had been a business flop, but a critical success: Tim Berners-Lee had used a NeXT to develop the World Wide Web. However, before he signed on with Apple, Jobs showed that he had not changed all his spots. Apple desperately needed a new operating system, and NeXT had a good one. He persuaded Amelio to purchase, not just the operating system, but the whole company for what many observers thought a very generous $400 million.
Almost his first piece of advice to the Apple board was to fire Amelio and for the advisor to become the interim CEO. He then replaced the entire board of directors, but this time brought in some people whose advice he was prepared to listen to. He continued the cost-cutting that Amelio had started, and ended the licensing of the operating system to third parties. Being the only company with “the whole widget”, combining hardware and software – was what made Apple different in his eyes.
His first priority was “giving Apple back its soul”. He quickly identified the truly talented amongst Apple’s ranks of engineers and designers and urged them to press ahead with all speed on a new computer aimed at consumers that looked unlike any other. – the i-Mac. This time his many suggestions were mostly welcome and he did not seek to take most of the credit himself. A new advertising campaign reinforced Apple’s radical image, with the theme “Think Different”, emblazoned on portraits of idiosyncratic, Jobsean heroes from John Lennon to Picasso.
Jobs’ stated intention was to put Apple back on its feet as quickly as possible, and then get back to Pixar full-time, but the more he got into rescuing his first love, the more clearly he heard destiny calling. Destiny was the word he used in May 1998 when he unveiled both the startling new iMac and his strategy to the world. It was actually not that different from the 1984 mission statement, except that it was aimed primarily at discriminating consumers. What differentiated Apple would be not just making the whole widget, but being by far the most innovative company in the computer industry. Innovation and great design would be the key to its renaissance.
The iMac became a smash hit – two million were sold in the first year. It was followed in 1999 by a family of laptops that were generally acknowledged to be the best available. Powerful new desk-top machines for designers also had a warm reception. In 2000 sales revenues rose a third to $8 billion and profits hit a record $786 million. To massed applause Jobs announced that he was dropping the ‘interim’ prefix from his title. In 2001, the long-awaited OS X emerged and set a new benchmark for user-friendly operating systems. The first of a number of bold new stores opened, whose popularity was to play a big part in boosting the brand. The annual gatherings of enthusiastic customers at MacWorld Expo trade shows become devotional events once again.
Although Jobs had achieved a remarkable revival in Apple’s image, self-confidence and share price, none of this was going to be enough to make Apple a reliably profitable company in the long-term. Indeed in the next financial year, when trading conditions were tough, sales slumped back to $5.4 billion, profits disappeared again, and there was to be precious little growth in sales over the next two years. The fundamental problem was that however stunning Apple’s products were, they still had to compete with utilitarian PCs whose performance kept rising and prices dropping in remorseless synchronicity with Moore’s Law. Apple could charge a premium, but it too had to keep cutting prices every few months or they would get out of line with the main market. The glory from being so innovative was gratifying, but Microsoft could get away with shamelessly and clumsily copying innovations like OS X, in Vista, its replacement for Windows, and make far more money from it than Apple ever could.
Apple needed to find more radical ways of being different.
A musical revolution
Jobs main strategy for tempting customers away from Windows conformity was the Digital Hub: the best possible portfolio of consumer software for people who mainly wanted to have fun with their computers. The first item was iMovie, a simple editing tool for users of camcorders. iPhoto was to prove a similar hit for the rapidly growing number of amateur photographers with digital cameras. In 2000, work started on an easy way to organise digitally stored music, and in January 2001 iTunes was born. iTunes was a delightful program, but it lacked a satisfactory physical platform. Most if not all MP3 players were, in Jobs’ words, crap. Their capacity was limited, they were difficult to load and use, distinctly un-cool, cheap plastic gadgets for geeks. Jobs decided that Apple could do very much better and the iPod was conceived.
The Apple team was fortunate in finding some excellent technology, in particular a tiny Toshiba hard disk with enough capacity for a thousand songs, but what they produced was as different from any previous MP3 player as a swan from an ugly duckling. The man who made the iPod a masterpiece of minimalist design was Jony Ive, who had been responsible for the startling appearance of the iMac. He was egged on by a perfectionist CEO with his customary maniacal attention to detail, endlessly pressing for more simplicity, speed and elegance. It was at Jobs’ insistence that the i-pod had no specific on-off switch, but the really radical decision was to dispense with plus and minus keys for making choices, and use a wheel to whiz through selections. The atmosphere on the project was reminiscent of that on the original Mac eighteen years earlier, except that it was not so much revolutionary fervour that drove them on as a strong desire to have one of these artefacts themselves and a strong hunch that other people would too. Financial analysts who got wind of the iPod thought this was a typically zany Jobs distraction from the serious business of competing with Microsoft – how could there be any money in this?
What emerged in October 2001, just in time for Christmas, was the iconic Apple product for the twenty-first century – brilliant technology, incredibly easy to use and simply beautiful. As with the Mac, people fell instantly in love with the iPod, but in this case they bought it. It was mostly about being able to carry all your music with you in one tiny device, but according to one survey, 13% of purchasers did so primarily on aesthetic and sensual grounds. They just couldn’t stop touching that wheel and revelling in the sheer coolness of the thing. Over the next twelve months 300,000 were sold, and in 2002-03 nearly a million, generating revenues of $345 million. This was becoming much more than just a satellite to the Digital Hub – it was a business in its own right.
One thing the iPod lacked was a way of loading music other than just copying CDs into iTunes. It needed something as easy to use as Amazon, but would people pay for music they could get free? Up to now, online music had been a disaster for the industry – the young saw no stigma in sharing their songs, and were doing so on a frightening scale on online networks like Napster. First there was the even knottier problem of persuading the major labels to allow Apple to create a legitimate online music store. The music industry’s attitude to technological change to date had been a blanket refusal to consider any accommodation with it, and to sue anyone or anything that might pose a threat to its copyright. In 1998 it had tried, and failed, to prevent the first manufacturer of MP3 players even from selling such dangerous devices.
As a bona fide media player in his own right, and someone who understood both technology and the creative process, Jobs was well placed to convince them that allowing him to sell their songs online was more of an opportunity than a threat. To sweeten the pill, he allowed the companies to keep 66 of the 99 cents charged for each song – a much better margin than they got from conventional retailers. He just wanted the store to break even – its function was to feed demand for iPods. He reluctantly accepted restrictions on how often songs could be copied, using the “protection” of Digital Rights Management, and only asked for a year’s commitment initially. Jobs emphasised that the experiment would be confined to Mac users, the only ones currently using iTunes and iPods, and told the majors, “If a virus gets out, it’s only going to pollute five per cent of the garden”. (Actually an overstatement of Apple’s market share then.) They decided that Apple couldn’t ruin the record business in a year and bit the bullet.
The iTunes Music Store opened in April 2003 with 200,000 songs initially. In its first week it made a million sales, more than had ever been legally downloaded before. In its first year it sold a hundred million and within three years a billion. The site worked particularly well because it was integrated with the software all Mac users had. Apple also had many years’ experience of downloads through its popular QuickTime movie trailer service. But the key factor was that buying music in this way, instantly and by the song, rather than a whole album, was so convenient.
To make this, and the iPod, a real mass market, iTunes needed to be opened up to the Windows barbarians, but it took some while for the iPod team to convince Jobs, as the original point of the Digital Hub had been to differentiate the Mac. Eventually, he accepted that the scale of the opportunity justified some dilution. Persuading the music industry was easier – iTunes was the only new source of revenue they had at a time when record sales were collapsing. Releasing what Jobs mischievously described as “the best Windows application ever written” opened the floodgates. In the last quarter of 2003, 730,000 iPods were sold. Then something extraordinary happened – instead of falling off in the quarter after Christmas, sales actually rose. In 2004 as a whole, 8 million iPods were sold, and in 2005, 38 million. By 2008, a total of 160 million had been sold.
This of course transformed Apple’s finances. Sales revenues reached $8.3 billion in the year to September 2004, but net income of $276 million was still only 3% of this. In fiscal 2005, sales hit $13.9 billion and profits $1.3 billion; by 2007 they were $24 billion and $3.5 billion respectively. The halo of the iPod and the immensely popular Apple stores were helping sales of computers, but it was one particular satellite of the Digital Hub that was doing all the pulling. By 2007, Apple’s share of the PC market had doubled to 6.3 percent.
What was most extraordinary about this was that Apple faced no serious competition. Other makers of MP3 players churned out machines that matched some iPod features but none came close in customer appeal. Even with a substantial price premium and a not exactly stellar reputation for durability, the iPod still had more than 60% of the market in 2007. Whilst the real competition at the low end of the market was coming from mobile phones with enough memory for music, Apple trumped this in 2007 with the iPhone, a much easier way to use the mobile Web than anything Nokia had devised, and distinctly cooler.
One explanation for Apple’s dominance may be that most consumer electronics manufacturers just didn’t get it – they did not understand what was so special about these little things, and if they did, had no idea how to make something comparable. In 1997 Michael Dell had publicly advised Jobs to close Apple down and give the money back to shareholders. In 2005, his company announced what it called the Dell DJ, smugly declaring that, “Style is nice but function and value are what matter to customers”. Apparently not – a year later the DJ was withdrawn from the market.
Apple had effectively created an entirely new market in which it alone had the capabilities to compete effectively. The only serious challenges were coming from new models it brought out itself. It stunned the market in 2005 with the tiny iPod Nano – only 0.27 inches thick, yet still with a capacity for 1,000 songs.
Nobody could accuse Jobs of resting on his laurels. “Our revenues have doubled in the last two years, our stock price is high and our shareholders are happy. And a lot of people think it’s really great, we’ve got a lot to lose, let’s play it safe. That’s the most dangerous thing we can do. We have got to get bolder, because we have world-class competitors now and we can’t just stand still”.
Insanely Great
The iPod is a fabulous success story by any standards. For a company that had been on the ropes for years it was miraculous. Jobs could not take all the credit, and was happy to share it with Ive and other colleagues. His distinctive style of leadership however has clearly been crucial.
It is perhaps too soon to make an objective assessment of this renaissance and its durability. The digital music market is still very young, and it remains to be seen whether Apple can retain leadership – it still only makes money from the devices rather than the music. What is clear is that it is a different company from the one that was on an endless rollercoaster ride for its first twenty years, one rather more like the Sony that Regis McKenna had suggested should be its model. It is not so different however. What has remained constant, even if somewhat stifled during the dark days, is a matchless ability to be creative and a compulsion to be different. Those qualities have sometimes represented terrible weaknesses. They have also been its greatest strengths.
Even without the brilliant successes of the i-pod and i-Tunes, there are grounds for qualifying the conventional wisdom on Apple’s ‘failure’ to hold onto leadership of the PC industry it played such a big part in creating. That industry grew massively and changed beyond recognition, and for most of the 1980s Apple grew with it. It lost market share and made dreadful mistakes, but no company has been able to dominate the PC industry in the way that IBM did the mainframe world, and no one company ever could have. The leadership of Microsoft, Intel and Dell is of a very different nature. Apple never had the capabilities to challenge them in the mass markets that emerged, but it did carve out its own premium segment.
Many have argued that if Apple had licensed its operating system software to other manufacturers, it could have mounted a more serious challenge to Microsoft. That may be true, but it is far from certain that the benefits to Apple would have outweighed the costs and the risks. Microsoft is a formidable adversary, especially when threatened, and could well have crushed Apple, which was in no position by the end of the 1980s to mount a serious challenge. The network effects and feedback loops that developed behind Windows were irresistible, just as they had been for VHS in the videocassette war of the 1970s.
But the Mac did not go the way of Betamax. In fact, of all the pioneers of the PC industry, Apple is the only one whose staying power compares with Microsoft’s. Even when the company itself was badly led, it held onto that segment of the market it articulated in 1984: individuals who value “high quality, easy to use products”. Unlike nearly all of its rivals, most of whom faded away, it was never simply selling technology, but great products that incorporated brilliantly innovative hardware and software. It redefined on several occasions the concept of what a personal computer could be. Though it never really penetrated corporate markets, and probably never could have, it has been consistently good at attracting the most talented designers, visionaries and marketers, and has produced time after time products that amaze and delight consumers. Its ‘niche’ has never become commoditised, as most of the PC market has. It has the highest brand loyalty and rates of repurchase of any computer manufacturer.
The crucial quality it lacked in its early years was discipline, but it was so gifted in other respects that it got away, just about, with breaking rules that others disregard at their peril. Scarcely any companies have the talent to model themselves on Apple, and later chapters make frequent reference to its weaknesses, but there is little doubt that the world is the richer for Apple’s existence. It has come as close as any business has to making a dent in the universe.
