Geek In Disguise

I was busy looking for an old article about Steve Jobs in Wired recently and through the serendipity of search I was reminded of this great Wired cover and the article inside. It was titled "101 Ways To Save Apple" and was published back in 1997 when people thought Apple was about to go under - a thought which is mildly amusing now given the success of their business. What was even more amusing to me was the number of the suggestions that have been part of the success story - see below for some great examples.

Did Steve read this before returning? Check #52....Oh and could Wired do one for Microsoft please? Not that I think we're going away but hey, I'm always open to good ideas :)

5. Straighten out the naming convention. Link model numbers to processor speed. When buying a 3400 laptop computer, what, exactly, are you getting? Unless you study the brochures, you don't know how it compares with its competition. On the other hand, Wintel talks explicitly about processor speed. It's a Pentium 200-MHz box.

7. Don't disappear from the retail chains. Rent space in a computer store, flood it with Apple products (especially software), staff it with Apple salespeople, and display everything like you're a living, breathing company and not a remote, dusty concept.

10. Get a great image campaign. Let's get some branding (or rebranding) going on. Reproduce the "1984" spot with a 1997 accent.

13. Exploit every Wintel user's secret fear that some day they're going to be thrown into a black screen with a blinking C-prompt. Advertise the fact that Mac users never have to rewrite autoexec.bat or sys.ini files.

23. Create a new logo. The corporate graphic of the multicolored apple was tired in the 1980s, now it's positively obsolete. Plaster the new logo on hats and T-shirts to be worn conspicuously by Andre Agassi, Nicolas Cage and Ashley Judd.

31. Build a PDA for less than $250 that actually does something: a) cellular email b) 56-channel TV c) Internet phone. (okay the iPhone is a tad over $250!)

34. Port the OS to the Intel platform, with its huge amount of investment in hardware, software, training and experience. Don't ignore it; co-opt it. Operating systems are dependent on installed base; that is your biggest hurdle now. It is not the head-to-head, feature-set comparison between Windows and Mac OS.

50. Give Steve Jobs as much authority as he wants in new product development. Let Gil Amelio stick to operations. There's no excitement at the top, and Apple's customers want to feel like they've joined a computer revolution. Even if Jobs fails, he'll do it with guns a-blazin', and we'll be spared this slow water torture that Amelio has subjected us to.

52. Return to the heady days of yore by insisting that Steve Jobs regrow his beard.

98. Testimonials. Create commercials featuring real-life people in situations where buying a Mac (or switching to a Mac) saved the day.

Needless to say there are some that were wildly off the mark such as Admit it. You're out of the hardware game but that doesn't make such a good story!