Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [123]
Visicalc did wag. And because it was available, at first for $100, solely on the Apple for twelve months after its formal introduction in October 1979, it wagged harder for Apple than for any other manufacturer. Visicalc was what helped Apple creep into small and large businesses. It was an electronic spreadsheet which could calculate the effect of changing one number in a tabletop of numbers. It offered the precision of a good accountant, the sprightly touch of a bright financial planner, and the plodding steadiness of a reliable bookkeeper. It also provided another compelling reason for Apple to shift even farther away from the home market. Fylstra tagged along to dealer training sessions to demonstrate Visicalc on a wide-screen television. Business users were convinced. Fritz Maytag, president of San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing Company, was ecstatic: “I trust Visicalc more than my own financial statements. It’s just a miracle.” Of the 130,000 computers sold by Apple before September 1980, Michael Scott estimated that 25,000 were sold on the strength of Visicalc.
“You’ve got to play guts ball,” Morris said.
Early breakfast meetings were an inescapable fact of life for almost everyone at Apple. So one morning at 7:30 sharp the waitress at the Good Earth Restaurant was filling large brown mugs with coffee. The trimmings of the restaurant belied its name. There were plastic menus, vinyl bench seats, veneer tables, and the baroque wicker chairs that importers like to say are made in Thailand. The only trace of the good earth was a smell of cinnamon that seemed to come from the wallpaper.
Anthony Morris, an Apple dealer from Manhattan, was having breakfast with the Mac marketing manager, Michael Murray. Morris, in a blue pinstripe suit, starched white button-down shirt, and silk tie, let out an early morning sigh as the waitress disappeared. “Cleavage this early in the morning. Cupertino is getting decadent.” A Stanford MBA, Morris was considered one of Apple’s better dealers and was among two hundred invited to Cupertino for a preview of Lisa. There was some industry chatter as Morris passed on scuttlebutt that another computer company was going to avoid complying with FCC regulations governing new products by introducing an entirely new disk drive but giving it a name belonging to an existing series. “The sales rep was all over town boasting about this. But last year she took a year off to finish her master’s in arts and dance so that tells you a lot.”
Morris, who sold only Apples, mentioned that he was about to start carrying computers made by IBM and DEC. “We could not survive selling only Apples,” he explained, “so there’s been a loss of faith or what some would call the emergence of sound business practices.” He paused. “Apple has to start thinking about the business customer. Those buggers are demanding.”
Murray raised his eyes from his breakfast plate and asked, “What would it take to make you cancel IBM?”
“I probably won’t,” Morris replied. “First, the Apple III was going pssss. We’ve got twenty-eight people. I cannot feed them when sales are going down. It’s scary how quickly your business goes down. Second, my clients want IBM and nobody has ever got fired for buying IBM. IBM’s goddamn thorough. They have done a lot of thinking. They understand the business user. The message from IBM is if you take ’em on you can double your sales in ninety days.” Morris mentioned a fellow dealer in New York City. “He did a million dollars in a month. He didn’t do that with Apple.”
Murray countered, “We’re going to hang Mac out in front of the dealers and make them salivate and see if we can get some momentum away from IBM. We’ve got so many different kinds of dealers. How do we understand our best one hundred dealers? How do we get you really excited?”
Morris argued