Effective January 1 ...
If I’m not willing to eat my own dog food, so to speak, why should anyone else?
In October 1981, Inc. made history by putting Steve Jobs on a magazine cover.
Jobs was 26 years old at the time, and Apple—then called Apple Computer—had just gone public. He was worth an estimated $163 million. He's bearded on the cover with a full head of hair, frozen in time.
As history, it's well worth checking out. This is Apple before the iPhone, before iTunes, before the MacBook, heck, before the Macintosh. It's the Apple that Gen X-ers like me might remember from elementary and middle school—when I first learned a bit of programming on an Apple II.
Two takeaways:
First, much of the article focuses on decisions made by Apple's first chief executive officer, Michael Scott (yes, same name as Steve Carell's character on The Office), who was CEO from February 1977 to March 1981—as opposed to Jobs.
Second, it's largely about a decision that Scott made in 1980, the year before the article came out, and expressed in an eight-sentence memo that was "circulated" to employees:
EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY!! NO MORE TYPEWRITERS ARE TO BE PURCHASED, LEASED, etc., etc.
Apple is an innovative company. We must believe and lead in all areas. If word processing is so neat, then let's all use it!
Goal: by 1-1-81, NO typewriters at Apple... We believe the typewriter is obsolete. Let's prove it inside before we try and convince our customers.
Now, I know this memo is almost laughably anachronistic. But in 1981, the typewriter was still pretty close to state of the art. Announcing that your entire company would no longer use them was game-changing.
Case in point: Apple was the leading personal computer company, so I spent about 30 minutes Tuesday trying to figure out how many Apple II's it had actually sold by 1981.
Apple's Securities and Exchange Commission filings don't go back that far online, but I found a secondary source saying Apple did $334 million in revenue in 1981. If we estimate a $2,500 price point for the Apple II then, that would put us at about 132,000 computers sold that year.
Another completely unsourced statement (so take it for what it's worth) says by the end of 1982, it had sold 750,000 Apple II computers.
Either way, it's a pretty small number. They still had a giant market to capture.
I know this is comparing apples to oranges (sorry), but consider that last year, Apple reportedly sold nearly 47 million iPhones.
Even Jobs, in the same article, held up the personal computer as being on a par with four other office innovations that really weren't that old at the time:
the IBM Selectric typewriter,
the calculator,
the Xerox copier, and
the "newer, advanced phone systems."
Look, I love this article, largely because I love business history like this.
Unlike political history and military history, I don't think we go back often enough and try to put ourselves in the shoes of business decision-makers, to discern what lessons there are for today.
But in the case of Apple back in 1981, Scott—and even Jobs, who famously didn't get along with him—are basically saying the same thing in different ways: If I’m not willing to eat my own dog food, so to speak, why should anyone else?
Low power mode continues. Thanks for reading. Photo by Laura Rivera on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before on Inc.com. See you in the comments, and have a happy new year!
Great story, Bill! I have to say, you have a remarkable range of interests. But today I want address a different subject. I remind you of your introduction of Cai Emmons on August 15, 2022 (If I could speak again...) Having been introduced to her in the remarkable way that you do so well, in the intervening months I developed a passing but loving relationship with her. I was fascinated by her courage, her intensity, her devotion to her writing, yet knew that she would soon be dead. Well, today, January 2, 2023, she contacted all her friends to inform us that on this very day, she was to preserve her dignity by voluntarily and peacefully leaving this earth. Cai -- I will see you in the afterlife, for, being almost 95 years old,, I expect not all too many remaining years. myself. Thank you, Bill, for the introduction.
My mother used an IBM Selectric for years as a paralegal (before there was an actual "title" of paralegal) in various law firms when I was growing up. She had an odd attachment to it, and often said that it felt more "real" than any other keyboard she had used since. She was known for carrying it home (or one time, someone brought it to her in the hospital) to finish work. She passed away this past May, and she had acquired another one somehow. It was in need of repair, and we sold it at the estate sale, along with ribbon and two "golf balls" which is how you could change the font with those. Those things are HEAVY (weighed in at 45 pounds). I remember hearing the hum and clunk and tap when she used it.
As you already know that the typing pool died out with the advent of the word processor because of how the people who marketed the word processor presented it. If you consider that the people who worked in typing pools enjoyed and stayed in that field because of the "sameness" of it all (go in, put in paper, prop other paper up on stand, or plug in Dictaphone, and type, day after day) were presented with "this is a whole new thing" and its "vast differences," these people who loved the familiar and comfort of "sameness" headed for the hills.
I love the fact that Apple did testing within before they brought it to the market. That was a brilliant strategy. Basically, they wanted to sell to people who were similar to themselves. I once heard some marketing person say that "your best customer is who you used to be."