Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [165]
In Cupertino Markkula and Jobs elaborated on their advertisement. Markkula said during the week IBM announced its computer, “We don’t see anything out of the ordinary. There are no major technological breakthroughs and there isn’t any obvious competitive edge that we can see.” Even at the time it was clear that the leaders of Apple were grievously underestimating the power of their new rival. Markkula could barely contain his irritation when asked how Apple planned to respond to IBM. “We’ve been planning and waiting for IBM to get into the marketplace for four years. We’re the guys in the driver’s seat. We’re the guys with one third of a million installed base. We’re the guys with a software library. We’re the guys with distribution. It’s IBM who is reacting and responding to Apple.” He added, “They’ll have to do a lot more reacting and responding. IBM hasn’t the foggiest notion of how to sell to individuals. It took us four years to learn about it. They must learn about distribution structure and independent dealers. You cannot reduce time by throwing money at it. Short of World War III nothing is going to knock us out of the box.” Jobs had his own, clipped appraisal of the IBM announcement and predicted, “We’re going to outmarket IBM. We’ve got our shit together.”
“Paradise is a cheeseburger,” Jimmy Buffet said.
Like a nervous spinning top Apple’s hot-air balloon bobbed alongside an enormous stage. When its gas-burner flared, the balloon tugged at its moorings and the generous Apple logo, stitched on the side, glowed. The balloon was the most visible sign of Apple Computer in the place where Stephen Wozniak was promoting what he wanted to be the largest rock concert ever held. At the end of the summer of 1982 Wozniak financed a grotesquely magnified version of what could have been an outdoor party at his split-level home. His Labor Day weekend rock concert turned into a Disneyland version of Woodstock and had little to do with either computers or companies. It dealt with the thin look of fame, the tinny sound of legend, and with billboard America.
Wozniak erected his rollicking, collapsible monument in a scrofulous desert bowl at the edge of the largest suburb in the world. Here on the doormat of Devore, a little town that nobody noticed apart from its 372 inhabitants, a colony of nudists and drivers who dropped off the freeway for gas or a hunk of watermelon, Wozniak chose to stage his first three-day rock ‘n’ roll festival.
From the start the concert was a tribute to Wozniak’s generous innocence and his steadfast belief in the pleasures of the more abundant life. He had drifted away from Apple, enrolled again at Berkeley, and remarried. He puttered about the Berkeley campus or his shingled home in the Santa Cruz mountains, with its psuedowooden turrets and glorious view of Monterey Bay, that he shared with his second wife, four llamas, two donkeys, three Siberian huskies, four mutts, an Australian shepherd and a red-tailed hawk. He equipped the house, which his friends took to calling Woz’s Castle, with the amenities of life: a video-game room, wide-screen television, ceiling-high stereo system, and what seemed like an example of every personal computer and peripheral ever made.
Nevertheless, he was bored. The idea for an enormous rock festival offered some distraction. He said that he first thought of it while driving around in his car and listening to a parade