If we've learned one thing from cutting Apple's four decades of history into weekly slices, it's that there is never a dull week. Yet if we've learned two things, the other is that the company is every bit as much a story of people as it is of products. Talent plays a gigantic part in the company's success, but then so does ego: and right from 1976 to now, the relationships between colleagues, friends and partners in Apple shape how we see the firm, how it acts and how it succeeds -- or fails.
In this particular week of March 12 through 18, 1976-2016, you get to see that some things never change, and some things are now unrecognizable. You see Apple learning what to announce, and what not to. You see decisions that were arguably wrong turns, and others that were ultimately more positive.
Relationships
Easily the nicest news of the week, the news that is all positive and stayed that way, is that on March 18, 1991, Steven Paul Jobs and Laurene Powell married. He was 36, she was 27, and the service was officiated by Zen buddhist Kōbun Chino Otogawa, who was 53.
Around 50 people attended the service, and every single one arrived by a chartered bus at Jobs's insistence: he controlled every aspect of the day. According to Walter Isaacson, the wedding cake was a strictly vegan one, made in the shape of Half Dome, a granite crest in Yosemite. Reportedly many of the guests found it inedible, and Otogawa's mumbling marriage service incomprehensible. Apple's Avie Tevanian, later to become Apple chief software technology officer, told Isaacson: "I thought he was drunk."
The guests included Jobs's father, Paul, and sister Mona. The service was in the solarium at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park, and snow fell hard outside throughout. Afterwards, the guests all went hiking.
On March 1, 2016, the Ahwahnee Hotel was renamed the
Majestic Yosemite Hotel as part of
a trademark dispute that may turn out to be temporary.
In the same year that she married Jobs, 1991, Powell earned an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business -- and today, amongst many business interests, she is working to create a new form of high school. In the most recent
Forbes magazine list of powerful women in the world, Laurene Powell Jobs is at number 44 (Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany is number 1). That's from 2015, and the year before she was listed as number 29; in 2013, she was number 39.
Also in 1991, the couple's son Reed was born. He was followed by daughters Erin and Eve, in 1996 and 1998 respectively. Less cheerily, you know that Steve Jobs died twenty years after their marriage, in 2011; Kōbun Chino Otogawa died in 2002.
Falling out
This week in Apple history saw another relationship take a blow: flash back to March 17, 1985, and Steve Jobs is visiting the offices of Frog Design. This was the company that was responsible for what was once the very familiar and very distinctive look of Apple products, the Snow White design. Arguably, the Lisa 2 had Snow White elements, but officially it debuted in full on the the Apple IIc, yet it's far more familiar on the Macintosh SE.
There's no question but that you know it when you see it, or that this design style was used on an enormous number of Apple products -- from 1984 to 1990. That's the official date that Apple's work with Frog Design finished, and the Macintosh IIfx was officially the last product done this way, but elements of the Snow White designs continued on monitors, peripherals and in various slightly-altered forms on Macs too until at least 1994.
Frog Design wasn't an Apple company, though, and that's ultimately why the computer firm eventually developed its own in-house division. In March 1985, however, Apple was crucial enough to Frog that Steve Jobs could do this: he forbade the company from working with Steve Wozniak. Jobs saw some designs for a product Woz was working on called CL9 (short for "Cloud Nine") after having acrimoniously left Apple, and Jobs said no. "We don't want to see our design language used on other products," is what Jobs is supposed to have said, but Wozniak knew it was personal. "Steve Jobs has a hate for me, probably because of all the things I said about Apple," he said at the time.
He means that he'd been criticizing how Jobs was ignoring the Apple II computer in favor of the Mac, even as that older device was the one keeping the company going. That was true, and sales of the Mac had been nowhere near as high as Jobs had expected: he'd been saying the Mac would sell half a million before the end of 1984, its launch year. It's now not clear when the Mac did cross that half million count, but on March 17, 1987 -- another two years and a bit later -- the one millionth Mac was made.
Six of them were. Apple took six completed Mac Plus computers off the production line. and called each of them the millionth. One of the six was presented to Jef Raskin, who had started the original Macintosh project at Apple, but long ago left after being pushed aside by Steve Jobs. This Mac Plus was reportedly the first Macintosh Raskin ever owned.
Computers for the Millions
During his time at Apple, Raskin wrote a document called "Computers by the Millions." It's a short document with a complicated history, as he says he wrote it in late 1979 and it wasn't published until 1982, but
Stanford University's copy of it ascribes it to circa March 18, 1980. That's the date of a memo sent from Raskin, as he circulated the document around Apple, and asked for comments.
"In order to better study the questions that impact the combined hardware/software/tutorial Macintosh research project, I found myself asking what kind of changes from present practice will be forced on us if the computer is to be produced in quantities that will impact society much more heavily than do the present computers," wrote Raskin. "If any of you feel that some or all of this material should not be published on grounds that it would divulge 'inside information,' please let me know. Neither the topic nor the contents have gone outside the company at present."
There was an objection from Mike Markkula along exactly those lines, and the document did stay as an internal report for two years. According to Stanford University, it was "considered too sensitive to show to outsiders."
Reading it now, it seems logical and sensible: it chiefly talks about the costs of building computers in large numbers.
However, it also ends with thoughts about the impact of so many computers being used. "It is easy to anticipate that many of these computers will end up on shelves alongside of unused tennis rackets, trumpets, and fondue pots. Nobody questions that small improvements in the quality of life of people who do a lot of writing, filing, and scheduling will occur. But will the average person's circle of acquaintances grow? Will we be better informed? Will a use of these computers as an entertainment medium become their primary value? Will they foster self-education? Is the designer of a personal computer system doing good or evil? The main question is this: what will millions of people do with them?"
Some of those millions of computers
Good luck guessing how many computers there are in the world today -- and don't forget to count TV sets, phones, smart watches and fancy doorbells -- but a few of them are made by Apple, and a few of them began in this week. The most notable is actually a range, as the Power Mac line was introduced on March 14, 1994.
You can well argue now that the Power Mac was a mistake, and that Apple should've gone straight to using Intel processors instead of Motorola's PowerPC ones. It's certainly true that the move to PowerPC was wrenching, in that it required applications to be reworked, and there was a period where users could be on either PowerPC or the previous Motorola 68000 line of processors. Yet the transition went well enough, and perhaps it can be seen as a trial run for the later, bigger, move to Intel and OS X.
Also, at the time, this move did speed up the Mac range, and it did produce some popular models. May I tell you something of my own Mac history? Picture the London office of a computer magazine with around 150 PCs -- and one Mac. I was allowed to test out the then-new Power Macintosh 6100 running System 7.5, and with these great speakers on the monitor. All of which looks very Snow White, even after Apple had ceased using Frog Design:
Two years later on March 14, 1996, the less-successful but perhaps equally-loved Newton MessagePad 130 was released. When Apple representatives visited that same London magazine, around the launch of the original Newton, they asked the editorial staff which they'd like to see next: a backlit screen, or a color one. Everyone said backlight, immediately, and it was a universal refrain from Newton owners that would be answered by the MessagePad 130.
So it was a significant update in some ways, but otherwise the 130 was a quite modest bump in the specifications: alongside the on-demand backlit screen, it got an increase in RAM from 2Mb to 2.5Mb. Newton fans were presumably happy to at least see some action: the previous MessagePad 120 was then getting on for two years old. The future wasn't looking very bright for the product though.
Still, at least at the time it had a future, and over the next couple of years Apple did develop and ship further versions of Newton. Unfortunately you have to contrast that to something else that was announced at the Power Mac launch on March 14, 1994: Copland.
It was to be the next operating system for the Mac, it was to be the operating system that beat Windows, it was never to ship. Certain elements of it did, with some of its features ending up in System 7.6 and then System 8.0, but Copland itself never materialized, and neither did its planned follow-up, Gershwin. It sounded great: Copland in 1995, Gershwin in 1996. Yet in 1997, Apple's then-chief technology officer, Ellen Hancock, said at a
MacWeek conference that: "I still have not met anyone at Apple who was working on Gershwin. Which gave me a clue the it's not soup yet." (Quote via Apple Confidential 2.0 by Owen W. Linzmayer.)
Turmoil
Apple was clearly not the software development engine it is now, but then it was also not the stable, financially-sound company that it is today. Copland struggled on with an ever-growing wishlist of features, it struggled on against the rise of Windows 95, and it also struggled on in the face of ever-mounting financial problems. By 1996, the development of Copland had an annual budget of $250 million, and some 500 software engineers working on it. By 1997, that was over.
On March 14, 1997, the then-CEO Gil Amelio had reorganized Apple's management, and began making redundancies. "This time I'm going to use the two-by-four approach," he said. "I'm going to put this place through the most gut-wrenching change it's ever had." What is it with Apple CEOs and firing people? Mike Scott had made a similarly provocative statement on his Black Wednesday --
see This Week in Apple History for February 21, 1981 -- that "When [running Apple] isn't fun any more, I'll fire people until its fun again."
Mike Scott fired 40 people. Gil Amelio got rid of 2,700. There is one parallel, though: for both men, their round of layoffs was the start of the end for their own time at Apple.
Never-ending legal battles
Maybe lawyers look back at the formation of Apple, and wonder at how a company started in a bedroom before it even moved to a garage could grow up to become such a force in billable hours. On March 17, 1988, Apple formally sued both Microsoft and Hewlett Packard over Windows' imitation of the Mac. (Hewlett Packard was named because it sold a product called New Wave, which made Microsoft's Windows more Mac-like.)
The suit was an 11-page document filed in the San Jose federal court, and eventually Apple would seek $5.5 billion in damages. It needn't have bothered. While it would take some years, Apple would lose the case.
If you're thinking that this is typical, that Apple allegedly can't protect itself against copying, now with Samsung or other phone manufacturers any more than it could then about Windows, remember two things. That we just said "allegedly," in case any lawyers are reading, and that Apple lost that Windows case because of how poorly it phrased its contract, meant to grant Microsoft limited use of its ideas.
There was also this, though. On March 15, 2000, Apple won a case. Federal Judge Robert Pratt dismissed a lawsuit from a company called Microwave Systems that claimed Apple infringed on its trademarked product name OS-9. The judge concluded that Apple wasn't trying to trade on this firm's good will or reputation, and had used Mac OS 9 in good faith.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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