Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [121]
It was Markkula who guided the formation of alliances that Apple used to great purpose. The company allied with larger companies to give a durable sheen to its image. It joined with ITT, for example, to distribute computers in Europe (though the relationship eventually foundered) and with Chicago’s Bell & Howell, which had a strong reputation among teachers, to help place Apples in schools. “Markkula was the driving force who made these things happen,” Trip Hawkins, an Apple marketing manager, recalled.
Markkula was receptive to approaches made in 1977 by Andre Sousan, the Commodore official who had once wanted to buy Apple. Sousan recalled: “I said to the two Steves and Markkula, ‘Listen! You’re not going to make it on the scale you want to make it if you don’t go immediately to Europe. I’ll set up the operations as if they are a part of Apple and I’ll write up a formula which will allow you to buy it out.’” Apple, stretched to the limits, agreed and Sousan became a member of the Executive Staff.
In March 1978 Markkula called Dow Jones’s Princeton, New Jersey, offices, spoke to Technical Director Carl Valenti, and asked for an appointment. Valenti recalled: “I told him I had a space on my calendar for nine the next morning. He said, ‘Fine.’ I didn’t realize he was calling from Cupertino. So next morning in walks Mike Markkula with bloodshot eyes, having come on the red-eye.” Markkula showed Valenti how he had programmed an Apple II to fish stocks off the Dow Jones News Retrieval Service and the pair agreed, on a handshake, that the two companies would jointly develop software programs. “The other companies,” Valenti observed, “came in and tried to tie us up ten ways to Sunday. Apple didn’t do that.”
Closer to home Apple was one of the first microcomputer companies to recognize the importance of users groups. When the company drew up plans to organize its first international users group, a memo stated: “A major element in our strategy would be to draw heavily upon outside resources in planning and executing this meeting.” It continued: “There is no one who sells as well as a committed, involved user who cares about his vendor and his product.” In San Francisco a group was formed to help solve a practical problem. As one of its founders, Bruce Tognazzini, explained, “We couldn’t figure out how to work the damn computer.” These groups, which gradually started in dozens of cities along with local and regional chapters and their own publications, not only helped spread the word and promote software development but also served as a way of keeping track of owners, maintaining a pool of guinea pigs for testing new products and providing bodies to recruit.
Markkula recognized better than any of his colleagues the way in which appearances could affect business. When, in 1979, Apple rented a large booth at the National Computer Conference in New York, it was calculated to impress the financial analysts who, sooner or later, would make judgments about what Apple was worth as a public company. Occasionally Markkula’s taste for splash got the better of him and a foray into the sponsorship of automobile races where Apple spent more than one hundred thousand dollars backing a Southern California team was a flop. “It was the worst thing we ever did,” said Jobs. Scott’s far simpler and cheaper idea of a balloon decorated with the Apple logo, inspired by some beer commercials, was far more successful. The moral seemed obvious: Relatively small expenditures could bring a disproportionate amount of publicity.
As happened with minicomputers, outsiders developed dozens of uses for the Apple II which had not even been contemplated in Cupertino. Little companies started to make attachments that plugged into the machine. The printed circuit boards that slid into the expansion slots of the computer would turn it into a clock or a calendar or allow letters to run across eighty columns rather than forty. Rows of extra memory chips were designed to boost the Apple’s memory; other cards allowed the computer to connect with a telephone.