Turbulences in the early. sThe successful stock sale provided Apple with an extravagant amount of capital 1 billion, which could be spent on developing the company s next computer generation. This time, however, was quite turbulent for Apple and was marked by crises and inner power struggles. Designing on Apple III began in 1978. This computer was to be the successor to Wozniak s Apple II, and was finally introduced to the public in 1981. But it was not successful - a disaster or fiasco, since it had too many faults and did not work properly.
Nevertheless, the company was without any financial troubles, since sales of the Apple II continued to increase rapidly. Concurrently, Steve Jobs became the company s visionary and thought about the next computer generation. Such a visionary is a person who has both the vision and the willingness to put everything on the line, including his career, to further that vision. Jobs became a perfect visionary and convinced everyone around him with his vision.
In 1979, he and some other Apple employees visited the Xerox PARC Palo Alto Research Center, which was known for its advanced research in computing. What they saw was revolutionary and had never appeared on any personal computer before. The environment of the screen was graphically based with icons representing files or programs, with a mouse for pointing and moving at them, windows and pull-down menus. Thus, the user could interact easily with the computer without ever typing a single letter.
Jobs was quite impressed and wanted to transfer this concept on a new PC called Lisa, which was intended for the business world. Steve, however, came up with ever-new ideas for the designers of this project. He created chaos because he would get an idea, start a project, then change his mind two or three times, until people were doing a kind of random walk, continually scrapping and starting over. Markkula and Scott were concerned about the further progress of Lisa. So, in the course of a reorganization of the company, they decided to put John Couch, a former software designer at HP, in a charge of the Lisa project.
Jobs was made chairman of the boa rd to represent Apple in the public. However, Steve was shocked that he was taken the chance to fulfill his vision, and relations between him and Scott deteriorated. In February 1981, Wozniak, the technological brains behind the Apple I and II, crashed his four-seated airplane.
He hit his head badly and suffered from a case of temporary amnesia. For some time, he retired from the company and he finished his undergraduate degree at U.C. Berkeley. The company had grown rapidly to 2,000 employees, and some of them had joined Apple in the hope of a safe job. Setting an example, president Mike Scott laid off 42 people on a day which came to be called Black Wednesday. Apple was shocked since some of t hose people seemed to have been chosen arbitrarily.
Scott s management style became more and more disliked, and finally Mike Markkula decided to fire Scott and took over his position until a new president was found. The Lisa projectMeanwhile, Steve Jobs had discovered his new project. Soon he had taken control of the Macintosh project, which had been started by Jeff Raskin in 1979 to design a small and handy personal computer. Steve dedicated all his power to the Macintosh, which was to be a smaller and cheaper Lisa and was to revolutionize the way of computing.
The company was now separated into three divisions, Apple II, Lisa and Macintosh, which began competing against each other - particularly between the latter two. Lisa was developed by a number of experienced engineers and programmers who had been recruited from HP, DEC and Xerox. This project was the most professional operation ever mounted at Apple and was in contrast to Steve s bunch of young hackers at Macintosh. When Lisa was introduced to the public in August 1983, it was ahead of its time Lisa was easy to use because of the mouse, graphical interface and windows, and had additional features such as multitasking.
Though is was first welcomed by the press as revolutionary, Lisa failed. One problem was Steve s lack of self-discipline When introducing Lisa he talked about his Macintosh which would come out soon and with features like Lisa but cost only a fraction 2,000 instead of 10,000 for Lisa. The other strategic mistake was the announcement that the two computers were not compatible.
So it is no wonder many people waited until the Macintosh would come. Finally, Lisa, which was intended for the business market at its price of 10,000, lacked the ability to communicate with other computers - a fact which was decisive for this market. In the meantime, IBM had entered the personal computer market with its first IBM PC in 1981, and already dominated a large part of it. Its first PC wasn t an earth-shattering machine technically and was much harder to use than the forthcoming Apple machines.
But the fact that it was built by IBM was enough to make it successful, and many software companies wrote applications for it. Apple had bravely run a full-page ad saying Welcome IBM, Seriously, but it soon seemed to have lost the battle. Nevertheless, IBM s entry brought Apple a lot of publicity as the only real competition to Big Blue. Thus, Lisa was not very successful and the second failure after the Apple III. Still, Apple s sales increased - only because of the successful Apple II. But the company needed a successor, and all its hopes were now placed in the Macintosh.