Return to the Little Kingdom (43 page)

T
he stock market provided the loudest applause for Apple Computer but there was plenty from other quarters. Small newspapers tracked the progress of Apple IIs all across America and greeted the appearance of these personal computers with charming, goggle-eyed astonishment. This was an updated version of the gasps that had followed the arrival of automobiles in muddy country lanes and of radios in quiet living rooms. But now the photographs were not of a family sitting upright in stiff leather seats with hats poking over the brow of a windshield, or knitting and smoking around a fireplace while ears were tuned to the wireless perched in holy splendor on a mantelpiece. The new trailblazers were pictured in hunched positions around a screen that glowed, their hands perched on a keyboard, and the heads that tilted toward the camera seemed to be saying that the future had arrived.

As well as the photographs of the flash-stunned teenager in the family den, there were snapshots of Apples in libraries and class-rooms, banks and laboratories, mobile homes and airplanes, houseboats and music studios, and there were even a couple bracketed to electric guitars. Reports of these California curiosities slipped into papers like the
East Aurora Advertiser,
the
Geneva
(Neb.)
Signal
and the
Bristol Herald Courier
. The
Chaska
(Minn.)
Herald
marveled as BOY HANDLES COMPUTER PROGRAMS while the
Columbia Independent
in Ohio resorted to an apocalyptic tone: EUCLID JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL ENTERS COMPUTER AGE. When an Apple arrived in Southern California, the
La Jolla Light
announced COMPUTER AGE COMES TO COUNTRY DAY and the
Star Press
in Blairstown, Iowa, told of a farmer learning to program an Apple and finding the experience “not nearly as tough as it is to teach a computer person how to feed cattle.” Apples helped a belly dancer keep track of her Jezebel brassieres and monitored the temperature of mud around a semisubmersible oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. A University of Virginia coach used an Apple to calculate the velocity of a football and a Boeing engineer programmed his to forecast four out of five winners at a Washington State racetrack—but admitted, “The more I refine this handicapping program, the worse the results.” In Buffalo Grove, Illinois, a high-school senior organized a tennis tournament with an Apple and in Sarasota, Florida, a cerebal-palsy victim could communicate more easily after an Apple was connected to a speech synthesizer.

In Manhattan, a vice-president at W. R. Grace and Company programmed an Apple II to estimate how many sides of beef his company’s restaurant chain should order, while the poet laureate of Florida wrote paeans with an Apple hooked to a large-screen television. His words sparkled, rotated, and grew on the screen in line with their importance and he took to calling himself “a solid-state balladeer.” The Sunnyvale Police Department, working from physical descriptions, used an Apple to help search for the names of suspects. And in Santa Ana, California, a man was arrested for running a major prostitution ring with the help of an Apple that kept track of his four thousand clients, their credit history, and proclivities.

Overseas, Apples analyzed census data in North Africa, measured factors affecting crop yields in Nigeria, provided diagnostic assistance for eye disorders in Nepal, improved irrigation planning in the Sahara, monitored developing bank activities in Latin America, assisted a schoolteacher in Botswana, and in the darker reaches of the world like Cardiff, Wales,
The South Wales Echo
reported that for a university lecturer an Apple provided “a hobby that became a way of life” though his teenage daughter complained the new arrival meant “we don’t really talk to one another anymore.”

The users groups that sprang up all over the world added further testimony to the reach of Apple. The envelopes that arrived in Cupertino might have been addressed to a collector of exotic postage stamps. There were letters from Grupo Usarios Apple de Columbia, Brazil Apple Clube, Jakarta Apple, Apple Club Zagreb, Hong Kong Apple Dragon, Apple Gebruikers Groep Nederland, Catalunya Apple Club and others from Sweden and the Philippines, New Zealand and Israel, Tasmania and Guam.

In the United States new clubs in different cities invented names with the gusto that editors of cookbooks reserve for fresh concoctions. There were Apple Peelers and Crab Apples, Green Apples and Applebutter, Applesiders and Apple Tart, Applepickers and Apple Jacks, Apple Pi and Apple PIE, Appleseed and Applesac, Appleworms and Apple Cart, but two with the nicest ring were Appleholics Anonymous and Little Rock Apple Addicts. Magazines with names like
inCider, Apple Orchard, Call Apple
and
Apple Source
were published to reach customers and dealers. Exhibition halls were rented to stage Appleexpos and Applefests that were undisguised celebrations of the company’s computers.

Apple’s founders were presented with Apples of various sizes, fashioned from so many materials that they must have wondered why they hadn’t called the company Matrix Electronics. They were deluged with apples carved from koa, mahogany, cedar, and redwood, fired in porcelain and china, dried in papier-mâché, blown from crystal, melted in brass, and stamped in plastic. There was also a proliferation of memorabilia supplied by little companies that specialized in making corporate trinkets and icons. There were apple belt buckles and apple pens, apple doormats and apple goblets, apple notebooks and apple paper knives, apple calendars and apple paperweights, apple key chains and apple bumper stickers.

 

As Apple became a major computer company there were less convenient, more oblique compliments to the size of its success. There was, for a start, the irritating flattery of imitation. On the East Coast of the United States, Franklin Computer Corporation manufactured a machine very similar to the Apple, called it the ACE 100, and in advertisements shamelessly touted it by placing an apple in a prominent position and declaring that it was “sweeter than an apple.” (In federal court in 1983 Franklin admitted that it had copied Apple’s operating system.) A computer from Commodore was boosted with a series of commercials saying that it was “the worm that ate the apple.” In Taiwan and Hong Kong local knock-off artists made copies that were decorated with names such as Apolo II, Orange Computers, and Pineapple. A West German computer distributor manufactured still another look-alike, a small Italian firm designed a computer that bore a lemon logo, while a British firm decorated its machine with a rainbow-colored pear.

In California Apple was troubled by a local disease, becoming a carcass for headhunters to pick over. The more persistent got to be so well known that Apple’s telephone operators were ordered not to forward their calls. Undeterred, the cunning “executive recruiters” simply resorted to false names. Apple was not immune to job-hopping and in time people started to leave. It was by no means a mass exodus but the dribs and drabs were enough to be irritating. The lure of other start-ups, the sight of the flaws and frailties of Apple’s founders, and the fear of getting bogged down in a large company all helped to nudge the ambitious toward the door. Within two years of the public issue, four small companies had been started by one-time Apple employees, and even if the turnover was nowhere near as high as in some corners of Silicon Valley, it was also nowhere near as low as Apple’s managers liked to say.

So with all these accolades—some overt and some opaque—the people working in the creamy shadows of the Cali Brothers grain silos in Cupertino had ample reason for pride. They could be excused if they sometimes dreamed that the world was no longer round but had assumed the shape of their corporate logo. However, as they started to believe that Apple was a top dog, the company also became intrigued with the notion of empire, and an aggressive conceit threatened to unravel much of the earlier success.

Outsiders who had followed Apple’s progress spotted the danger signals. Hank Smith, the venture capitalist, began to warn the officers of other young companies about the penalites of success and he used Apple as his case study. Richard Melmon, who had worked on the Apple account for the Regis McKenna Agency and was later connected with a software company that sold programs for Apples, agreed: “Everybody at Apple sits around and says, ‘We’re the best. We know it.’ They have a culture that says it and it starts from Steve Jobs and works on down.” And Ed Faber, the president of Computerland, summed up Apple’s swaggering demeanor: “The word that keeps popping up is ‘arrogant.’” Arrogance seeped right through the company and came to affect every aspect of its business: the style with which it treated suppliers, software firms, and dealers, its attitude toward competitors, and the way it approached the development of new products.

 

From the outset, the shape and style of Apple’s computers was Jobs’s primary interest. Within months of the introduction of the Apple II, he became vice president of research and development and thereafter almost always had the final say in major product decisions. As the company grew, and Jobs’s influence mounted, so did the force of the tactics he had used to push, goad, prod, cajole, and coax Wozniak during the development of the Apple II. He was always attracted to the latest, and brightest prospect, and in time the more interesting projects came to be associated with his presence.

Jobs had little interest in laborious research. There was nothing he believed in more deeply than his own intuition and his sense and touch for where the technology and markets would meet. Long-term product planning and a sense of how Apple’s different computers would combine to produce a uniform lineup was a subordinate concern. With the continued success of the Apple II, Jobs developed what amounted to a religious faith in the strength of his instincts: “You make a lot of decisions based on the fragrance or the odor of where you think things are going.” He was unwilling to let product planning become burdened with analysis, focus groups, decision trees, the shifts of the bell curve, or any of the painful drudgery he associated with large companies. He found Apple’s prototype customer in the mirror and the company came to develop computers that Jobs, at one time or another, decided he would like to own.

Inside the company he gained a reputation for possessing a flair for getting things done, for having a gentle touch for the “soft side” of production. “He has,” said Bill Atkinson, “a drive for excellence, simplicity, and beauty.” And Tom Whitney observed, “One of Jobs’s attributes is an infinite patience to make something better. It’s never good enough for him. He always wants more features with less cost. He always wants to leapfrog the next natural step. A lot of the success of Apple is due to his damned stubbornness but it’s also very difficult to work around because he always wants everything.” Another who watched him closely was more skeptical. “He would have been happier as Walt Disney. One day he could have been working on rabbits’ ears, the next day on Disneyland, the day after on movies, and the day after that on Epcot Center. The trouble with the computer business is that you don’t get to change your mind a whole lot.”

Jobs developed computers the way he improved himself. He had a knack for adopting other people’s ideas when they suited his needs, discarding the aspects he found wanting, making subsequent improvements, and finally delivering opinions (or computers) with such conviction that it was easy to believe they were his entirely original contribution. But his strengths were also his greatest weaknesses. An ability to listen to convincing arguments provided an immune system against his snap judgments, but underlings came to be wary about speaking their minds. His optimism, what one manager called “the depth of his technical ignorance,” meant that he underestimated how long computers would take to develop or what price they would sell for. Gradually the lineup of Apple’s computers came to reflect Jobs’s own temperamental, unpredictable, inconsistent streaks.

Yet his audacious, aggressive nature colored Apple’s computers and was the spark that lit the company. Two years after the introduction of the Apple II, work was either starting or proceeding on five products which bore the code names Sara, Lisa, Annie, Mac, and Twiggy. Sara, named for the daughter of its chief hardware designer, eventually became known as the Apple III. Lisa was named after Jobs and Nancy Rogers’s daughter. Annie was a low-cost Apple II which never saw the light of day. Mac was one person’s favorite apple. A group working on developing a disk drive called their product Twiggy because, in its original incarnation, it was supposed to bear a physical similarity to the British model: It was going to house two diskettes and thus, one enlightened engineer decided, would come to resemble the fragile model whose figure was adorned with two mini-floppies.

One of the consequences of visible corporate glory was reflected in the ambitious schedules established for the Apple III. Those timetables reflected none of the perils of developing computers that had been carefully spelled out in numerous articles and books. “We were terribly optimistic about the schedules on the Apple III,” said product designer Jerry Mannock. “The Apple II had been so successful that everybody was walking around thinking they could do anything.” From the start the Apple III was supposed to be a stopgap product, a bridge between the time that Apple II sales were expected to drop and the day that Lisa was ready.

It also came to be seen as a test of Apple’s ability to build a computer as a company. The circumstances had obviously changed since the days when Wozniak made gross modifications to the Apple I, and though Apple’s payroll had lengthened so had the company’s commitments. There was a growing band of customers who needed attention and support, there were the sundry distractions of corporate life, and there was also the need to have large numbers of the new computer ready to ship at the time of introduction rather than the dozens that were needed after the announcement of the Apple II. The schedule for the Apple III was the sort of timetable that might have been set by a hobbyist determined to show off a design at the Homebrew Club. It called for a computer that would be designed, tested, and ready for manufacture within ten months of conception.