Better be a pirate than join the Navy
By early 1982, the Macintosh was beginning to be acknowledged as a significant project within Apple, instead of a quirky research effort, but it still remained somewhat controversial. Since the Mac was sort of like a Lisa that was priced like an Apple II, it was seen as potential competition from both groups. Also, our leader Steve Jobs had a habit of constantly boasting about the superiority of the Mac team, which tended to alienate everybody else.
Mac programmer Andy Hertzfeld in Folklore.org
The Updated Book of Jobs
It was during that pivotal year of 1982 that a crucial event happened that shaped Steve’s relationship with the media. In February, at age 27, he appeared on the cover of Time Magazine (Microsoft chairman Bill Gates was supposedly infuriated Steve got there first — he would only appear on Time’s cover two years later). He was depicted as a symbol of America’s young entrepreneurs.
Steve was pleased and agreed to give the Time reporter, Mike Moritz, carte blanche for writing a book about the history of Apple in general and Macintosh in particular.
By the end of the year, there were serious talks about naming Steve Jobs Man of the Year 1982. Mike Moritz, who had been appointed Time’s San Francisco Bureau Chief, started conducting lengthy interviews in anticipation of the story. But to everyone’s surprise, Time decided to go with “the personal computer as machine of the year 1982.”There was no Man of the Year! Instead, Moritz wrote a piece called “The Updated Book of Jobs,” (see the Articles section in Links) in which Jef Raskin said that Steve “would have made an excellent King of France.” Steve was furious. He called up Jef Raskin and Dan Kottke, his friend from Reed, who (anonymously) said to Moritz that “something is happening to Steve that's sad and not pretty, something related to money and power and loneliness. He's less sensitive to people's feelings. He runs over them, snowballs them.” It is rumored Steve never talked to Dan again.
Steve would be a lot more suspicious of the media from then on. He would also be even more protective of his privacy — as the Time article brought up the situation with his illegitimate daughter Lisa.
John Sculley
In January 1983, Steve traveled to the East Coast for the launch of Lisa. It was sort of an awkward situation, given that the chairman’s heart clearly belonged to Macintosh. And he couldn’t prevent himself from saying so — he would always point out that a few months later, a better GUI computer was going to come out, with superior software yet at a fraction of Lisa’s price. Moreover, the Lisa software would not run on Macintosh. This attitude only worsened a critical response that was already negative, given the machine’s whopping $10,000 price tag.
While Steve was in New York City, he met with PepsiCo executive John Sculley. Remember Apple was still looking for a CEO, since the departure of Mike Scott. The board would not let 28-year-old Steve Jobs run the company as he was way too inexperienced. Steve seduced Sculley into moving to California to become Apple’s CEO and groom him into a full-blown manager. The words he used are now legend in corporate history:
Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?
quoted in Triumph of the Nerds
In Sculley’s first months at Apple, his relationship with Steve Jobs seemed almost like a honeymoon. They would both go at lengths in the media about how they got along so well that they could finish each other’s sentences. Steve really thought of Sculley as a friend, taking him in his typical long walks on Stanford hills.
More importantly, Sculley agreed with Steve’s vision of making Macintosh the #1 priority at Apple. Throughout 1983, Lisa turned out to be a bomb in the marketplace, like Apple III before it. Apple was still relying only on its six-year-old Apple II computer — whose market share kept shrinking because of the IBM PC. Macintosh had to succeed, or else the company would be out of business very quickly.
Why 1984 won’t be like “1984”
After Lisa came out in January 1983, the whole Lisa group joined Steve and his team to get Macintosh ready for market. The team quickly grew into several dozens of people — the renegade days seemed long gone.
Everything didn’t go smoothly: all the teams were late, and the management eventually had to decide on a date for the introduction of the product. They picked Apple’s 1984 shareholders meeting, on January 24. There was also tremendous pressure to make software available to the new platform for the launch. Several software developers signed up, including market leader Lotus and Bill Gates’ Microsoft, whose main business at the time was the IBM PC’s operating system, DOS. But one of the hottest issues was Steve Jobs’ antagonizing attitude. He would keep on berating the other divisions: he famously called the Apple II engineers (who were the only ones bringing cash in) “the dull and boring product division.” After Lisa was launched, he also said in front of the whole development team, including people who were about to get fired: “I only see B and C players here. All the A players are with me on the Mac team.”
As far as marketing was concerned, Steve went to Chiat/Day with Mike Murray, and they worked together with Lee Clow on a breakthrough Macintosh commercial, 1984. They hired a young director, Ridley Scott, to shoot an ad that depicted Apple’s computer as a blond, athletic Californian girl throwing a hammer at IBM-Big Brother’s face on a huge screen. The ad concluded that 1984 wouldn’t be like George Orwell’s “1984.” The ad was so audacious it was almost canceled, but in the end the board went for it. It is now widely acknowledged as one of the best TV commercials ever created. It was aired during Super Bowl XVIII, on January 22 1984, and started an enormous media hype around Macintosh’s introduction two days later.
When the day finally came, Steve proved once again his talent as master showman. He introduced Macintosh as a revolution to a cheering crowd at Cupertino’s Flint Center auditorium. As he came off stage, he said:
It’s the proudest, happiest moment of my life
quoted in Triumph of the Nerds
After what Apple had been through for the past three years, every hope turned to Steve’s Macintosh to salvage the company. It was a perilous bet...
Disappointments
At first, the Mac did seem to be a huge hit. In the couple of months that followed its introduction, Steve Jobs and the development team posed for countless photos, gave more than two hundred interviews, and ended up on several magazine covers.
There was also a significant success on US campuses. Before the introduction, a team of Apple salespeople led by Dan’l Lewin had convinced twenty-four Ivy League institutions to sign up for the so-called Apple University Consortium program: they would become Apple dealers, buying Macintoshes wholesale and selling them at a discount retail price to students. Throughout 1984, Macintosh became the first cult machine of American college students.
But after this encouraging wave of early adopters, Mac sales started to plummet. There were several concerns about Apple’s computer: first, it was painfully slow, as its processing power had difficulty handling the complex Graphical User Interface. It was also a bit pricey, selling for $2,500, a thousand more than the IBM PC it was supposed to compete with. But the biggest drawback was software: Macintosh being a brand new platform, almost no program could run on it when it was launched, whereas a ton of applications were already available on the IBM PC platform. Everyone agreed that Macintosh was a lot friendlier and easier-to-use, that its technology was far superior to that of the IBM PC; but it was useless. Mike Murray’s marketing team was criticized for not advertising the machine appropriately: businesses felt it was a cute machine for yuppies and their kids, not a computer that would improve their productivity.
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