Great Story.
Great commercial.
But there’s just one thing that jangles.
Apple’s launch wasn’t a runaway success. The price was nuts for the performance offered. It shipped with MacWrite and MacDraw and there were few programmes from 3rd party developers.
In Becoming Steve Jobs:: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader Brent Schlender reports: “MAC SALES FELL off a cliff in the second half of 1984. The Apple II still accounted for 70 percent of the company’s revenues. IBM’s PC was gaining market share. And the New Year provided no relief. Sales were so far off target that it began to look like the Macintosh might prove to be just as much of a failure as the Apple III and the Lisa. The board of directors, which had been led to believe that the Mac was both the replacement to the Apple II and an IBM-killer, was beginning to see that neither its CEO nor the head of its most important product division had a clear plan forward. As the pressure grew on Steve and Sculley, the two spent less time together, less time finishing each other’s sentences and singing each other’s praises. And that spelled trouble for Steve.”
The 1984 commercial was a thing of wonder but there were other stunts that had far reaching effects. Apple booked every single page of advertising in Newsweek magazine (when it had pulling power). It spelled out the benefits of the Mac is plain speak — it seems appropriate to borrow an Orwellian sounding word…I also remember taking part in their Test Drive promotion. Take a Mac home in its bag…never want to give it back.
All incidental details, I know.
What matters most is that the opposite of love isn’t hate but indifference — most advertising, 99.95% of it engenders barely a blip of interest, if any. We fell in love with Mac, forgiving its obvious shortcomings, not only because of the 1984 ad (which I was aware of long after it aired — via the snail mailed trade publications which found their way here to New Zealand) but also because it was ‘insanely great’. I could use a computer — even though I can barely count.
