101 Ways to Save Apple
101 ways to save Apple: (James Daly, Wired, 1997)
(head nod: DIGG)
Oh, this is too precious. Been there, done that, the cat sleeps on the T-shirt. I had to pull this up and comment on it a bit.
Of course, hindsight makes for easy 20-20 vision. But even form the view of being part of Apple 1997, some of this was silly.
By James Daly
An assessment of what can be done to fix a once-great company.
But who wants to live in a world without you? Not us. So we surveyed a cross
section of hardcore Mac fans and came up with 101 ways to get you back on the
path to salvation.
Okay, problem #1: geeks are crucial to the success of the company, and an important part of the user base, and without them as dedicated Apple developers, there IS NO APPLE. But having said that….
ASKING GEEKS HOW TO SOLVE BUSINESS PROBLEMS IS LIKE ASKING YOUR CAT TO COOK DINNER.
Hell, the cat may try; you won’t like the result.
1. Admit it. You’re out of the hardware game.
Outsource your hardware production, or scrap it entirely, to compete more
directly with Microsoft without the liability of manufacturing boxes.
Okay, let’s admit it. Apple DID outsource hardware; only it did it through outsourced manufacturing, not through licensing to third parties. And we already see reference to the key problem of that era: the feeling that it was a microsoft fight to the death, them or Apple. We know how that turned out (and not just for Apple, for basically EVERYTHING Microsoft decided to compete against for any number of years except Quicken; and they tried to buy Quicken…)
And for that, you can thank — Mike Spindler, former CEO of Apple (nickname “Diesel” among the Apple people there at the time; no, it’s not a positive honorific). That, folks is the key legacy of Spindler’s era at Apple: taking a competition that was already decided, making it a cornerstone of business strategy, and publically turning it into an either/or war of survival. Which is almost turned into.
2. License the Apple name/technology to appliance manufacturers and build
GUIs for every possible device – from washing machines to telephones to
WebTV. Have them all use the same communications protocol. Result: you
monopolize the market for smart devices/homes.
And you so devalue the brand that nobody cares about it any more.
4. Gil Amelio should steal a page from Lee Iacocca’s book – work for
one year without a salary, just to inspire the troops.
Let’s be honest. Real honest. Gil Amelio gets a bum rap for his tenure at Apple in many ways — I’m convinced he saved the company, or at least kept the patient alive long enough for it to be biovacced out to someone who could save it. Without Amelio, Infinite Loop would be filled with IBM engineers, or Sun, or Sony, or someone. But not Apple.
But Gil Amelio never understood Apple, not really. Not what makes it tick, not what makes it important, not what makes its employees care. he was a good numbers guy, a good process guy, and a really nice (from what I could tell) guy in general. But he couldn’t inspire a toaster to do his toast in the morning, much less a crew of Apple geeks who looked at him as grandpaw, not any kind of cheerleader. Elmer Fudd was better at motivation.
7. Don’t disappear from the retail chains. Rent space in a computer
store, flood it with Apple products (especially software), staff it with Apple
salespeople, and display everything like you’re a living, breathing company and
not a remote, dusty concept.
Actually, Apple did do this, with the “store in a store” concept. The problem Apple was running into, though, was too many dealers sold the macs badly, or used them only to help sell people who came in to buy one onto other products. There were a few really, really good Mac dealers out there — and lots of really, really bad ones.
So apple did their own stores, controlling the story and the sale. and, of course, when they did, the experts all thought they were insane. Like a fox.
12. Build a fire under your ad agency. People don’t need warm, fuzzy
infomercials about the Mac family. And who cares what’s on Todd Rundgren’s
PowerBook? People want to know about power (the CPU kind, not George
Clinton’s), performance, and price.
Half right. But GEEKS care about CPU numbers. the rest of the universe cares about “will it do what I need it to do?” — playing the GHz game has gotten Dell (and especially Gateway) and all of the others into trouble, while Apple went off and instead started talking about solutions (and building them), not gigahertz.
14. Do something creative with the design of the box and separate
yourselves from the pack. The original Macs stood out because of their
innovative look. Repeat that. Get the folks at Porsche to design a box.
better yet. hire jonathan ives, and tell him to have fun. To be honest, I’ve been seriously underwhelmed by the Porsche stuff in the computer space. Better to do what Apple did and create your own brand and style than license one.
15. Dump (or outsource) the Newton, eMate, digital cameras, and
scanners.
of course, it flies in the face of everyone who wanted Apple to do a Palm, or buy palm, or….
but one thing Apple did do; when it had third parties doing a device well, it partnered with them, not replaced them. Remember when Apple did its own printers? Now, Canon and Epson and HP and Lexmark are doing printers, and Apple sells them. Partnering can be good, when you can trust a partner (we’ll come back to that later).
17. Build some decent applications that the business community will
care about.
Or, realize that Microsoft office is what really matters, and make that a priority. stop ifghting with microsoft and partner with them.
and then go off and build some really kick ass products in OTHER market segments and instead of fighting microsoft for market share you won’t get back, grow the market and own the new stuff.
Fighting Microsoft is stupid. even in 1997, it was a failed strategy.
iLife and Final Cut and the like — creating new market is a lot better than stealing someone else’s. But it takes vision and the intelligence to see what doesn’t already exist.
18. Stop being buttoned-down corporate and appeal to the fanatic
feeling that still exists for the Mac. Power Computing’s “I’ll give up my Mac
when they pry it from my stiff, dying fingers” campaign hits the right note.
Except, of course, Apple already was, since Power computing really grabbed that from Guy Kawasaki and EvangeList. But what were Spindler and Amelio, anyway? they WERE buttoned-down, corporate guys. Apple need’s those guys — but their leader has to be more than that. Hence, the return of Steve (and Steve is smart enough to make sure they have the button-down guys, too, first in Fred Anderson, now in Peter Oppenheimer. Steve gets the public credit, but don’t for a second minimize the contributions of the CFO’s in making what Steve sees possible and profitable)
20. Tap the move toward push media
Oh, push media. Now there was a real market success….
21. Sell yourself to IBM or Motorola, the PowerPC makers.
better yet, switch to Intel!
22. Create a new kids’ computer, an upgradable Wintel-compatible
machine, in bright rugged colors that can take stickers and duct tape, and that
a young user can call his/her own.
And I always thought everyone hated the flower power iMac….
23. Create a new logo. The corporate graphic of the multicolored
apple was tired in the 1980s, now it’s positively obsolete.
Which is/was true. However, when Steve actually did this, did the mac loyalists scream. Of course, it didn’t take long to get used to the revamping of the logo; complete replacement not so necessary.
Plaster the new
logo on hats and T shirts to be worn conspicuously by Andre Agassi, Nicolas
Cage, and Ashley Judd.
Here we go devaluing the brand again. Of course, Apple actually did that for a while, both in yachting and elsewhere. Anyone remember the Apple race car? I wonder how many macs THAT sold?
24. Pay cartoonist Scott Adams $10 million to have Dilbert fall in
love with a Performa repairwoman.
Hey, even better: build great products they’ll fall in love with (and put in their stuff) for free.
Hint: consumers aren’t stupid. Marketing doesn’t save a bad product or a bad company.
27. Relocate the company to Bangalore and make it cheap, cheap,
cheap. (See Wired 4.02, page
110.)
Lots of companies ARE doing that now. My answer: check back in another 5 years. it’s going to go down in history as one of the great business disasters since, well, assuming that the “japanese way” is the only/best way. Some companies have done very well in India, and some will continue do. the lemmings that do it because they read it in CIO magazine are going to find themselves in an absolute disaster, just like any group that does things because they are told to, not because it makes sense for them.
31. Build a PDA for less than $250 that actually does something: a)
cellular email b) 56-channel TV c) Internet phone.
Here’s a great example of what’s wrong with this list: stuff geeks really want, but which (a) aren’t interesting to the general market, and for prices where Apple would lose money on every unit, but somehow, make it up in volume. Physics wins, folks. In pricing as well as life.
32. Advice to Gil Amelio: shorter speeches, tighter pants.
Dear Gil: thanks for what you did. But the speeches? No speeches, not shorter.
34. Port the OS to the Intel platform, with its huge amount of
investment in hardware, software, training, and experience. Don’t ignore it;
co-opt it.
gee. nice idea. why didn’t WE think of that?
35. Get MkLinux and BeOS to run on PowerBooks.
If there was a person who got it wrong WORSE than Mike spindler, it was Jean-Louis Gassee. Who was a big part of what made Apple almost die in the first place, but even worse, when Apple needed what he had, and felt it had no options, he still found a way to so screw up the deal so badly that Amelio was forced to go talk to Steve — and the rest was history.
If you think about it, the reason Apple is where it is today is because of two people: Mike Spindler and Gassee. Spindler had a deal to sell the company to Sun Microsystems, and got so greedy Sun walked. And Amelio was buying Gassee and Be to save Apple from itself, until Gassee got so greedy Amelio walked from the deal.
Imagine what reality might be like if either of these weren’t true.
38. Make it easier for ISVs to make applications for both Apple and
Wintel environments – if not at the desktop, then certainly at the server.
I actually was involved with one such product. It actually predated this article. Never saw the light of day, but aspects of it went on to become the Apple Network Server. Let’s just say that the idea and the reality differ strongly (although the version that ran NT probably had some legs, except Spindler was so vehemently anti-microosft he refused to allow an apple product to use microsoft systems and killed it)
43. Remain committed to the openDVD Consortium, addressing the issues
of implementing digital versatile-disc technology. You’ve always been a bridge
between the entertainment and high tech industries. Maintain it.
Hmm. Bridge between entertainment and high tech. Maybe we can work with that… Wonder how?
45. Don’t raise the Mac OS licensing fee. Cloners have helped
stabilize and even increase market share for the Mac OS; this keeps software
developers happy.
Here’s a hint: the cloners were not the friends to Apple people want to believe they were. Apple lost money on every license sold. The cloners went off and cannibalized Apple’s high end markets, making Apple’s financial woes worse. And they were more than happy — and clearly planned to — simply suck the market dry until Apple died, and then move on to something else with teh money once Apple died, because the public had decided it was all Apple’s fault, so they were the fair-haired boys, and it’d all get blamed on Apple.
Now, is licensing bad? No, I don’t think so. But that licensing deal was an absolute disaster (thank you, Mike spindler), and it took an Apple that was hurting and struggling and threw it down a well. Again, partnering is good, but only if you trust your partners and only if both sides benefit. In the licensing deal, Apple went out to the clone companies and asked them to help Apple grow the low-end market. The cloners (especially Power computing) instead built high end machines that were apple’s high end margin boxes, and ate that market alive. And Apple was stupid enough to write the deal such that it was perfectly okay for them to do this. So Apple gets whacked two ways. Every time someone bought a Power Computing, Apple lost money on the OS license royalty, AND Apple lost a hardware sale that was otherwise helping keep the company afloat. So thanks to the cloners for their help. Next time, just shoot us and kill us quickly….
49. Bring back Andy Hertzfeld and the other original Mac folks to
explain to the executive team that simplicity and design elegance are what made
You know, it really wasn’t the technology that was the problem, folks. It was the business. It was BAD BUSINESS processes and BAD BUSINESS decisions in adopting and building products and making those products work right. Bringing in geeks to discuss how to fix the business wouldn’t fix anything.
50. Give Steve Jobs as much authority as he wants in new product
development. Let Gil Amelio stick to operations.
or, just hand the company back to steve…
57. Bring back John Sculley. He would provide a convenient whipping
boy.
(hysterical laughter)
Sorry, couldn’t help myself. Sculley started the whole down spiral, by forgetting that he was a marketing guy and not a geek, and redefining himself as a technology futurist, or whatever in the hell he called himself. So he stopped paying attention to the details of the business and started trying to help design things like Newton and Pippin, and between he and Gassee, we got all sorts of really geeky, wonderfully ineffective products (like the original Mac Portable!). all while Apple’s business got lazy and bloated, processed got lost, politics became the battlefiend within the company, and products started getting boring, lazy and not terribly good in quality.
So eventually, Sculley got booted out. And replaced with… a Diesel. Who took everything that was going wrong at Apple and set the knob to 11.
58. Create dollar incentives to attract software vendors to write
for the upcoming Rhapsody platform. You have cash in the bank – use it.
Back then, you couldn’t, for a couple of reasons. First was that the cash was used to convince Wall Street and the investors in the company that the company was still viable. If that cash had bled away, so would have the company. And second — it did the same thing with employees. The company couldn’t spend the money because it couldn’t afford to look like it needed to.
60. Abandon the Mach operating system you just acquired and run
Windows NT kernel instead.
(hysterical laughter)
of course, maybe they tried that. Maybe someone like Spindler killed it. because it was more important to kill microsoft than save the company.
Nah. never mind. nothing to see here.
62. Build a computer that doesn’t crash.
my god, there’s hope for these folks yet.
now, in my eyes, waiting until #62 to say “build good, reliable products that work” shows that the priorities of this article are screwed up. Until you do this, NOTHING ELSE FREAKING MATTERS. Honest. IF you don’t do this, you do. And should.
Tell you the truth: Sculley forgot this. Spindler never understood it. Amelio did, in spades, and tried his damnedest to make it happen, but Apple (the bureaucracy) fought back, because of the politics of the company at the time. It took Steve coming back, and summarily shooting people who let the politics get in the way of fixing the company, to solve that problem (mostly).
63. Make Java work on your OS. Then develop an enterprise computing
strategy in partnership with Sun. Java is not a magic bullet, but supporting it
will keep Mac owners happy and prevent them from looking elsewhere.
Or maybe it’s not so important to TYPICAL customers, compared to geeks. And maybe not even to geeks.
64. Team up with Sony, which wants to get into the computer business
in a big way – think Sony MacMan.
Or better yet, invent the iPod, and kick Sony’s shiny little butt, and keep all the money for yourself.
65. Roll out the Mac Plus again as a hip retro machine. Make it
really, really uncool to use whizzy, leading-edge PCs.
This, from the same folks bitching about the 20th century mac about 20 items ago?
68. Retain your Apple Fellows at all costs. With Don Norman and Alan
Kay recently leaving, there is a serious drain in the Big Think department.
sometimes, what people AND companies AND projects need are fresh looks and new ideas.
71. Become a graphic design company and dominate your niche the way
Sun and Silicon Graphics do.
The way SGI *did*. which is amusing, because around the time this article was published, I was seriously considering jumping to SGI. I decided Apple was worth staying with. I seemed to have guessed right.
74. Solidify the management team. Pushing people out or allowing them
to leave does not inspire the remaining troops.
unless they are people who are screwing up the company and deserve to be shot, but the real world frowns on corporate firing squads….
75. Speed sells. Push your advantage on the speed of the processor.
until it doesn’t, and if it’s how you define yourself when that happens, you have big problems. Hello, Gateway?
78. Turn Claris loose so it can do some real damage.
Actually, probably not a bad idea.
80. Maintain existing loyalty at all costs. Use incentives like free
upgrades and stock certificates. Gimmicky? Sure. But it helps create a bond and
a religious following.
Customer religion is over-rated. So is losing money on every sale but making it up in volume. this kind of strategy merely convinces people that you don’t value your own products (so why should they?)
81. Merge with Sega and become a game company.
oh, god. that’s right. back then, Sega was actually successful. oops.
83. Develop proprietary programs that run only on Macs. Crow about
them.
Like, oh, iphoto, ilife, and Final Cut?
87. Price the CPUs to sell. Offer novice users the ability to enter
the Mac market at a competitive price point and move up the power curve as
their level of sophistication increases. The initial price keeps new buyers
away.
Okay, here’s the problem. THIS IS WHAT MIKE SPINDLER DID (or tried to). And we found out that cutting prices and cutting margins means machines cost less, and everyone still bought windows machines. so we ended up with a company with the same people buying the machines, but for less money and less profit.
Gee, great strategy.
I’m not saying price is not an issue. but price was a lot less of an issue than people wanted it to be. bad and boring products don’t sell at any price. good products sell at a premium. so why did we spend so many years trying to sell CHEAP instead of GOOD? better ask diesel about that.
91. Start a new special projects group led by either Jobs or another
passionate and creative designer to create the next “insanely great”
technology.
Or, just hand the company back to steve…
92. With each new Mac, include a CD-ROM that explains the Apple family
tree and future plans.
Or just include with every system software that actually allows people to do useful things they want to do, like, oh, ILIFE. Gimmicks don’t sell. Solutions do.
93. Develop a way to program that requires no scripting or coding.
or typing. Or lines of code. Or work. or time. no, wait, that’s the Easy Button, and someone else invented it first…
96. Partner with Oracle, using its technology for a backend database
with your friendly face.
AHHHH!!!!!!! what, partnering iwth Microsoft wasn’t enough? What evils are you requiring of us?
101. Don’t worry. You’ll survive. It’s Netscape we should really
worry about.
Ya think?
Now, seriously. The folks who dugg this into public view did it with a smirk. And I’ve done my own bit of giggling, but — there’s also a lot of good stuff in here, too. stuff that Apple ended up doing after Steve came back. So smirk if you want — could you have done better?
it’s really an interesting snapshot of a time and a place, no more or less.
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