Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [85]
Holt found that Jobs and the unruly Apple computer presented intriguing problems: “It was a challenge to do something on a commercial scale that had never been done before. It was the kind of problem that has a certain intrinsic appeal to me.” However, Holt was not about to let any part-time consulting, no matter how interesting, interfere with his weekly game of pool. And Jobs and Wozniak soon discovered it was impossible to talk to Holt about any subject without finding that he was armed with something more than rudimentary knowledge. An off-the-cuff remark about the glaze on a piece of pottery was liable to provoke a discourse on chemical treatments. An admiring comment about a snapshot would prompt a discourse on photogravure techniques. Grumbles about the price of memory chips would spark a lecture on the evils of the capitalist system while a casual mention of poker was almost certain to produce a spirited card game. Holt, the youngsters at Apple soon noticed, was the sort of person who would want to be on speaking terms with an electron and was quite likely to sit down in a restaurant and, on the back of a napkin, prove that he didn’t exist.
“It costs a helluva lot to have a revolution,” Goldman said.
Beyond the windows a long maroon steel beam hung carelessly from a crane. From the ground some laborers flashed earthy semaphore signals at the crane driver. The white crowns of their construction hats made bouncing mirrors of the sun. For the two dozen people seated around a U-shaped table in an anemic ground-floor office the noise of the work on Apple’s new corporate headquarters was sealed off by tinted windows. The drooping beam and the white hats were like a scene torn from a silent film on construction safety.
A few of the people at the meeting doodled and stared through the windows. About half were marketing managers from different divisions at Apple while the others came from the Chiat-Day advertising agency. John Couch, the head of the division making Lisa, sat anxiously on the edge of his seat. Fred Hoar, Apple’s vice-president of communications, smoothed his carefully combed auburn hair and Henry Whitfield stood beside an overhead projector. Others concentrated on Fred Goldberg as he made some remarks about the campaign that he and his colleagues at the advertising agency had prepared for Apple. Goldberg described some of the preparations for advertisements that would appear simultaneously with the company shareholders’ meeting where Lisa and the Apple IIes were to be formally introduced. He then started to outline a plan for advertising all of Apple’s computers.
“We’ve got a job to cut through the confusion and make a brand a brand,” Goldberg said. “We’ve got to build confidence among new users about which computers to use and when. Most people don’t just buy the computer. They buy the company, its size and the confidence it inspires.” He expressed some faith in the effect of the advertisements. “The running of around an announcement offers much less chance of backfiring than PR. When you run advertising you know what you’re going to get. Spending corporate money demonstrates corporate confidence in the product. It makes a statement when you spend your own money.”
Goldberg introduced the agency’s creative director, Lee Clow. A tall man with a faint stoop and a beard, Clow inhaled deeply on a cigarette and propped some poster-sized advertisements on a table. He pointed at the posters and said, “The second coming is the tenor of what we think this piece should be.” He read a chunk of the copy: “Evolution. Revolution.” He paused. “It’s very delicate to say that everything everyone else makes is obsolete, but that’s what we are trying to say. It’s very important that the Lisa introduction show that everyone else is an also-ran.” Clow finished reading the ad copy and some of the people from Apple