Why Read About the Macintosh?
Steve Jobs is back at Apple for the third time (once he battled Scully lost, and left; then, his illness last fall forced him out for six months or so this year). We've talked about Jobs return in 1997 (Mixner). His main job in 1997 was to refocus Apple on a few products, a few suppliers, and, mainly, success. It worked. Actually, that was a strategy similar to the one he followed in the early eightiesduring the Macintosh launch.
Let's remember the landscape. The Apple II had been a huge success for Apple, making Jobs a billionaire before he was thirty. The only problem was the Apple board thought Jobs was too abrasive for management and slowly forced him out of the Lisa project, the next new computer in the pipeline after the Apple II.
Jeff Raskin actually did the first concept work for the Macintosh. The idea was to fix the Lisa's mistakes of being too overblown and too over-priced (Levy, 109). He kept his head down as he sketched out what the Macintosh was and how it would work. Unfortunately, he didn't keep his head down far enough, as Job's figured out what was going on - something really good, basically - and forced his way in.
Jobs added a elegance to the Mac that we all still appreciate. His practice there is directly applied to the iPod and the iPhone. Even though it looked cool, the Mac was nearly a failure. It was priced too high (blame that on Scully, who added $500 just before launch (Levy, 180)). It didn't have enough memory. The floppies basically were toys, incapable of making back-ups easily. There were no expansion slots. Jobs hated expansion slots. All major flaws. However, even then, there Mac-o-philes who would take basically anything Apple created because it was cool and elegant (and the software, what there was of it, was truly cool).
So, why bring up Jobs again? His management style left a lot to be desired, or so you might say. However, his employees were honored to work for him. They knew they were changing the world even if they weren't treated so well. They got the product out the door - they actually shipped, something that was rare in many of the design heavy firms of the day like Xerox.
Ultimately, the Mac was reconfigured and became a wildly successful product. The delays left chinks in the Apple armor that MicroSoft and IBM happily took advantage. So Jobs did things wrong, too.
There's a yin and a yang here, with both sides of the story evident. We like to say that work today is all about teams and working together. OK, that's fair. But let's remember that there is also a role for inspired leadership that borders on dictatorship. Sometimes it actually works. It has worked at Apple three or four times now. Not a bad result.
Levy, Steven. Insanely Great. The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything. Viking. 1994.
Mixner, Jack. Strategic Realignment. http://mixnerstrategy.com/blog/2008/10/strategic_realignment.html