For many the PC was a piece of hardware. For Jobs, it had a soul that craved for design
In the early 1990s, Compaq Computer was the technology darling of the day, and PC sales were surging. Dell was promoting its build-on-demand model, Gateway computer shipped its products in boxes with Holstein cow markings, and IBM had introduced the ThinkPad with its Little Tramp marketing campaign. Apple’s Macintosh was introduced during the 1984 Super Bowl, but was considered a marginal outlier with its quirky proprietary OS.
About this time I had lunch with Bill Gates, who dismissed PCs as nothing but components held together by plastic and screws manufactured on low-cost assembly lines, a commodity business with narrow profit margins. The future belonged to software and semiconductor makers like Microsoft and Intel, where the real innovation was going on.
This made sense to me, and as the years unfolded, Gates seemed prescient. The PC makers were mostly reduced to commodity producers; IBM sold off the ThinkPad, H-P bought Compaq and may now abandon the business; Gateway was sold off and the brand has all but vanished. Apple nearly went under. But today, the exception is so glaring as to have stood Gates’ prediction on its head: Apple’s operating profit margins have grown (to more than 33%), and Apple’s m-cap of $347.3 billion recently is bigger than that of Microsoft & Intel combined.
Of all Steve Jobs’ accomplishments, this, to me, remains both the simplest and the most astonishing. How did he take a commodity – to borrow from the novelist Tom Wolfe, the “veal gray” plastic boxes that once weighed so heavily on both our desks and spirits – and turn it into one of the most iconic and desirable objects on the planet? “Steve Jobs and Apple never – ever – wanted to be a low-margin commodity producer,” Donald Norman, a former VP for Advanced Technology at Apple Inc. and author of “Living With Complexity,” told me recently. “Even the Apple II had some charm to it. It was the first PC that had professional industrial designers. Before that they were designed strictly by engineers, and they were ugly. Steve was always, if not an artist, then someone who was charmed by style. He had this dream of something beautiful. If it was going to cost more, it didn’t matter. This was in his genes.”
Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, recalled buying a 1990 Macintosh Classic and taking it back to Italy. “When I got home, I took it out of that brown, padded carrying case with the rainbow-colored Apple logo on it and put it on my desk in Milan. It was like a little pug dog looking at me. It wasn’t just something I worked with; it kept me company. It had such personality and such life.”
In the early 1990s, Compaq Computer was the technology darling of the day, and PC sales were surging. Dell was promoting its build-on-demand model, Gateway computer shipped its products in boxes with Holstein cow markings, and IBM had introduced the ThinkPad with its Little Tramp marketing campaign. Apple’s Macintosh was introduced during the 1984 Super Bowl, but was considered a marginal outlier with its quirky proprietary OS.
About this time I had lunch with Bill Gates, who dismissed PCs as nothing but components held together by plastic and screws manufactured on low-cost assembly lines, a commodity business with narrow profit margins. The future belonged to software and semiconductor makers like Microsoft and Intel, where the real innovation was going on.
This made sense to me, and as the years unfolded, Gates seemed prescient. The PC makers were mostly reduced to commodity producers; IBM sold off the ThinkPad, H-P bought Compaq and may now abandon the business; Gateway was sold off and the brand has all but vanished. Apple nearly went under. But today, the exception is so glaring as to have stood Gates’ prediction on its head: Apple’s operating profit margins have grown (to more than 33%), and Apple’s m-cap of $347.3 billion recently is bigger than that of Microsoft & Intel combined.
Of all Steve Jobs’ accomplishments, this, to me, remains both the simplest and the most astonishing. How did he take a commodity – to borrow from the novelist Tom Wolfe, the “veal gray” plastic boxes that once weighed so heavily on both our desks and spirits – and turn it into one of the most iconic and desirable objects on the planet? “Steve Jobs and Apple never – ever – wanted to be a low-margin commodity producer,” Donald Norman, a former VP for Advanced Technology at Apple Inc. and author of “Living With Complexity,” told me recently. “Even the Apple II had some charm to it. It was the first PC that had professional industrial designers. Before that they were designed strictly by engineers, and they were ugly. Steve was always, if not an artist, then someone who was charmed by style. He had this dream of something beautiful. If it was going to cost more, it didn’t matter. This was in his genes.”
Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, recalled buying a 1990 Macintosh Classic and taking it back to Italy. “When I got home, I took it out of that brown, padded carrying case with the rainbow-colored Apple logo on it and put it on my desk in Milan. It was like a little pug dog looking at me. It wasn’t just something I worked with; it kept me company. It had such personality and such life.”
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