Return to the Little Kingdom (25 page)

Goldberg introduced the agency’s creative director, Lee Clow. A tall man with a faint stoop and a beard, Clow inhaled deeply on a cigarette and propped some poster-sized advertisements on a table. He pointed at the posters and said, “The second coming is the tenor of what we think this piece should be.” He read a chunk of the copy: “Evolution. Revolution.” He paused. “It’s very delicate to say that everything everyone else makes is obsolete, but that’s what we are trying to say. It’s very important that the Lisa introduction show that everyone else is an also-ran.” Clow finished reading the ad copy and some of the people from Apple voiced their concerns.

“We don’t want the ads to step on the editorial,” Fred Hoar said. He pointed out that news reports would appear for a few days following the introductions of Lisa and the Apple IIe. “This is going to be a skyrocket. I want to give the PR some impact.”

Alan Oppenheimer, an Apple marketing manager with a generous smile and steel-framed spectacles, touched on a running sore. Though Mac and Lisa both relied on a mouse and on visual symbols, programs written for one wouldn’t work on another. So the marketers had their hands full trying to conceal the fact that Lisa and Mac might have been designed by different companies. “Maybe the master plan is not quite appropriate,” Oppenheimer said. “Mac and Lisa aren’t compatible. The technical press can see through it. They could take us apart.”

“The master-plan harmonic wouldn’t be something we’d ram home,” Hoar said, “but we’d like to dispel the idea that Apple is opportunistic, haphazard, and uncoordinated.”

John Couch rocked on the edge of his chair and commented sharply, “What we really want to say is ‘Here’s a personal office system. There’s been a hardware revolution in the seventies and there will be a software revolution in the eighties.’ That’s the message.”

A few seats down the table, Linda Goffen, who worked for Couch, nodded vigorously and added, “We have to preempt that terminology and make it our own.”

As the debate subsided Clow described the advertising agency’s proposal for linking advertisements for Lisa and Mac. He recited the tag line: “Introducing computers you don’t have to be afraid of even if you have to hold a mouse in your hand.”

“I think that’s almost technical suicide,” said Paul Dali, the tousle-haired head of marketing for the Apple II and Apple III. “Apart from the mouse interface they’re not similar. We shouldn’t be trying to create a family.”

“The only people that’ll beat us up on compatibility will be the
Fortune
500,” Couch said in a soothing manner. ‘They’ll say, ‘Why can’t I take my word processor home from Lisa and plug it into Mac?’ They’ll think we’re a bunch of dummies.”

“It’s an issue.” Henry Whitfield sighed. “These things are incompatible. People are going to find out sooner or later that they’re not going to talk to each other. Most of the
Fortune
1000 companies think we should have more compatibility. We’ll say we’ve tried to keep the price down to get back into more of a consumer marketplace.”

John Couch returned to the central theme of the meeting: how Apple could persuade people in large companies to buy Lisas and Macs. He started to complain about the data-processing managers who were used to controlling the computer power at large companies. “They’re more concerned about putting barriers up to prevent computers from getting to the rest of the world. They didn’t like Apple IIs running all over the place and now they’ve got IBM calling on them. We cannot compete with IBM from a sales and service standpoint so we’ve got to rely on technology. We’ve got to say, ‘It’s new technology. There’s a revolution out there. If the technology doesn’t meet your needs, still buy Apple because they’re way out in front of everybody.’”

“We’ve got to plant the flag right,” Paul Dali emphasized.

“There just isn’t enough money,” Fred Goldberg said, spreading his hands in a resigned way.

“We’ve been banging our heads against the wall to get more money,” Henry Whitfield observed. “We’re significantly underspending. We just don’t have enough money.”

“You cannot have a revolution and approach it with quarter-page ads,” the advertising agency’s Maurice Goldman agreed. “It costs a helluva lot to have a revolution.”

A
pple Computer was caught in a thin, flimsy world of amateurs. It was a comfortable place that many microcomputer companies were content to occupy. The engineers could argue into the small hours about circuits and clever pieces of code. The founders could revel in their newfound authority, snipe at the staid ways of large companies, place large advertisements in small publications, lick their lips at the sight of several thousand dollars, and generally conduct themselves like tinpot emperors of banana republics. Many of these people never understood what they didn’t know and were either too wary, or too cocksure, to seek advice from others more experienced in the ways of the world.

These receptacles of wisdom sat in dozens of low-slung buildings with steel frames, concrete walls, and blank panes of glass. By the mid-seventies these monotonous industrial barns had largely replaced the mosaic of fields and orchards that had once stretched over the plain alongside the western fringes of San Francisco Bay. They were home for the dozens of companies that had been founded during the sixties and seventies as the center of electronic novelty drifted south from Sunnyvale toward San Jose. There was a clinical frailty to these buildings that were sometimes called “tilt-ups” because the walls were made from prefabricated blocks of poured concrete which were tilted into position. The buildings looked as if they had been supplied by a builder with a florist’s yard. There were fresh curbstones, gleaming black asphalt, and cropped grass that had all the smoothness and allure of Astroturf. It was an industrial Levittown.

A quick drive around Santa Clara or Mountain View brought a blur of logos and signs that seemed to be contractions or combinations of about five words: Advanced-Digi-Integrated-Micro-Technologies. The similar sounding names that stood by the driveways were familiar to any regular reader of
Electronics News,
but to say the companies were all the same was about as perceptive as observing that most shirts come with collars, sleeves, and buttons. Life behind the walls had a transitory flavor and the old seasonal rhythms of rural life had given way to a pattern associated with young companies that was almost biological. It tended to run through a cycle of ambition, enthusiasm, exhilaration, complication, disillusion, and frustration. An electronics association had taken to publishing a corporate genealogical chart, and chroniclers of the electronics industry would patiently explain to newcomers how Fairchild Semiconductor begat Intel Corporation and National Semiconductor and how they, in turn, spawned other companies. The chart, which grew longer and more entwined over the years, had its share of corporate divorces, second marriages, stepsons, and illegitimate offspring, and the breeding patterns were so incestuous that in humans they would have led to birth defects.

The founders and managers of these companies were fond of saying that there was nothing they might need that wasn’t within an hour’s drive. There were lawyers to draw up incorporation papers, venture capitalists to provide money, contractors to lay foundations, interior designers to decorate offices, accountants to check the books, distributors who stocked parts, job shops to perform tedious chores, public-relations agencies to court the press, and underwriters to prepare stock offerings. Many of these men had grown up in the semiconductor industry. They hopped between companies, left to form their own, and kept loose track of one another. They were mobile reservoirs of experience who knew whom to trust and steered business toward one another. It was a small place where word and rumor traveled fast, where people frequently wound up working for someone they had once hired and where allegiances were to people rather than to companies. All these men worked or invested in the companies whose products eventually trickled down to Haltek and Halted and to the likes of Wozniak and Jobs. But for all the physical proximity, there was still a considerable distance between the professionals and the amateurs.

 

Jobs, with his keen internal gyrocompass, began to bridge the gap and called the marketing department at Intel to find out who was responsible for their distinctive advertisements. To the irritation of many Intel engineers, these weren’t cluttered with dull charts or black-and-white technical drawings and didn’t dwell on the esoteric strengths of a new chip. They used color and wraparound type and relied heavily on symbols to explain the potential power of the electronics. Poker chips meant profits, race cars, speed, cleavers, cost cutting, while hamburgers showed that chips could be made to order. Jobs discovered that the ideas and look came from an advertising and public-relations agency in Palo Alto that bore the name of its founder, Regis McKenna. Jobs rang the agency and was funneled toward Frank Burge who took informal responsibility for screening new businesses. Burge wasn’t about to be harried by some youngster who announced that he wanted to prepare a color brochure and said, “You guys do good stuff; I’d like you to do my mine.” Burge listened and told Jobs he would speak to him within the week. Jobs called Burge several more times. “There were always a pile of messages on my desk and Steve wouldn’t let his get to the bottom of the pile. I didn’t want to be rude to him so I finally said, ‘Yeah, I’ll come take a look.’ As I was driving over to the garage I was thinking, ‘Holy Christ, this guy is going to be something else. What’s the least amount of time I can spend with this clown without being rude and then get back to something more profitable.’”

After Burge saw Jobs emerge from the kitchen with his jeans, sandals, unwashed dank hair, and thin beard, his discomfort grew. “I forgot about being rude. For about two minutes I was just thinking of escaping. In about three minutes two things hit me. First, he was an incredibly smart young man. Second, I didn’t understand a fiftieth of what he was talking about.” Impressed, Burge checked Jobs’s credentials with another agency client, Paul Terrell of the Byte Shops. Terrell told Burge, “They have overextended themselves and need some organization. Jobs isn’t very comfortable in a marketing role.” A couple of weeks later, another of the McKenna executives met Jobs and suggested that the agency might be prepared to handle Apple’s entire marketing campaign for a share of the company’s sales revenue. He added that they should all await the result of Apple’s first advertisement and also subject the computer to some closer scrutiny. An agency memo noted the extent of Jobs’s progress: “Though he moved a quantity into retail distribution, there is as yet no evidence that the retailer(s) are successful in finding customers.” The memo concluded that “Steve is young and inexperienced,” but the final line cautioned: “Bushnell was young when he started Atari. And he claims to be worth $10,000,000 now.”

Eventually Jobs and Wozniak were introduced to the head of the agency, Regis McKenna. His business card, which carried the impish line REGIS MCKENNA, HIMSELF, sounded sturdier than the bearer whose fragile appearance offered a clue to his chronic diabetes. McKenna had careful eyes, thinning fair hair, and a soft manner of speaking that concealed some tough bones. But the business card did reveal his stock-in-trade, which was to make companies appear larger, more stable, and more imposing than they were. As one of seven sons, McKenna had grown up in the blue-collar shadows of the Pittsburgh steel barons, hadn’t bothered to graduate from college, and had moved to California at the start of the sixties as an advertising salesman for a family-run magazine company. He moved to the Peninsula during its hush-hush, super-super secret days, slipped into the electronics industry, and wound up at Fairchild. When National Semiconductor was taken over in the late sixties by some disenchanted Fairchild employees, McKenna also defected. He helped build National’s image by using ploys that included the distribution of pictures and profiles of the executives on baseball cards.

When McKenna started his own company in 1970 he won the business of Intel which had been founded by yet more refugees from Fairchild. For some time McKenna looked after the account by himself, wrote the advertising copy, and arranged for interviews with journalists. He suffered all the pains of starting and building a business and won some clients by keeping an eye on activity at new buildings around the industrial parks. Every now and again when he rewarded himself with a pay raise, he wound up putting the money back into his business. McKenna’s own taste was often reflected in his clients’ advertisements. His cashmere jackets came from Wilkes Bashford, a swank outfitter in San Francisco, while he paid for a work by the French surrealist Joan Miró by mortgaging his home in Palo Alto.

Yet the image of Intel, which formed the keystone of McKenna’s business, was probably shaped more by public relations than advertising. McKenna had taken pains to step beyond the electronics trade journals and cultivate reporters and editors at magazines like
Business Week, Fortune,
and
Forbes
. He had the cunning to make most journalists believe he was confiding secrets, and he was far more patient with journalists than the electronics executives who would invariably find some reason to complain and grumble about reporters and press coverage. Andrew Grove, then the executive vice-president of Intel, said, “He taught us to build relationships with the press rather than firing off press releases and hoping for wonderful things to happen.” McKenna had earned a reputation with reporters for being straightforward and not resorting to subterfuge. He liked to share industry gossip, made no secret of his pet likes and dislikes, and always practiced his wife’s advice: “Don’t pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel.” He seemed to gain more satisfaction from seeing a page-long story about one of his clients than an advertisement, but would occasionally sound like a Madison Avenue account executive—as in “We rolled out the Byte Shops with a full page in
Business Week
.”