Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [78]
There was an older, wiser fountain of advice. Kobin Chino was a Zen monk whom Jobs met after he returned from India. Chino had been active in the San Francisco Zen Center as a student of Suzuki Roshi, author of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, a reflective handbook for followers of Zen. Chino lived at a small Zen center in Los Altos and Nancy Rogers, who had followed Jobs and Kottke to India, was living in a tent near the ranch, taking meditation courses. Jobs visited her frequently and talked both to her and to Chino about abandoning Apple and heading for a Zen monastery in Japan. Both Chino and Rogers listened. The former was amused at the dilemma and, in broken English, advised Jobs to pursue the business, telling him that he would find business to be the same as sitting in a monastery. Jobs did some more soul searching. “I had a sense that Apple would be consuming. It was a real hard decision not to go to Japan. Part of me was a little concerned because I was afraid if I went I wouldn’t come back.” Nancy Rogers felt “Steve was afraid of Apple. He thought he’d turn into a monster.”
In the late summer of 1976 the managers and engineers at other computer, semiconductor, and video-game companies did not think that Apple posed a monstrous threat. At Atari, according to Nolan Bushnell, “We were up to our asses in alligators,” so the hobby computer market would have been a peripheral distraction for a company whose central line of business revolved around entertainment and video games. At the semiconductor houses like National Semiconductor and Intel Corporation, some enthusiasts formed small task forces, pored over magazines like Byte and Interface Age, clipped advertisements of some of the small companies that were advertising single-board computers, and paid visits at predictable and appropriate ports of call. They knocked on the doors of companies like MITS. They were given demonstrations of the Alto Computer which was being developed at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. They talked to the editors of the People’s Computer Company. They read industry surveys drawn up by research companies—which, in most cases, were little more than a man, a computer, and a cloudy crystal ball. They talked to some investment analysts at New York banks and were altogether thorough and dutiful. Then they retreated to their homes and offices to draw up arguments and marketing plans to convince their superiors of the bright future of microcomputers. They told them of the large number of hobbyists, of the puny competition, and of how semiconductors made up at least half the cost of a microcomputer.
Most of the chiefs were unimpressed. They thought the market for assembled microcomputers would be limited to hobbyists and most still bore the scars of earlier attempts to sell consumer items. Some years before, other young men had mustered similar arguments and had persuaded them to build digital watches and calculators. The results had been painful. The chiefs had discovered that expertise in one area wasn’t something that could be transferred to another and that technical superiority wasn’t enough to sway the consumer. Rapid price cutting and competition from the Orient had left some semiconductor companies with warehouses full of unsold calculators and watches.
The semiconductor houses were also faced with their own demands. William Davidow, a vice-president at Intel, remembered, “We had enough trouble keeping the wheels glued on our own machine without worrying about something else.” Meanwhile, the minicomputer companies decided it made more sense to shrink their machines rather than to try to build microcomputers. Both Digital Equipment Corporation, which introduced the DEC LS1-11, and Data General