Corporate focus: 1986-89
Part 1 - Jean-Louis Gassée
4-frogdesign || 5-Corporate focus || Conclusion || Bibliography & links
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Snow White was clearly a success, and frogdesign spent most of 1984 applying it to concepts that Jobs and Esslinger shared for a major update to the Macintosh. In the hands of Apple's engineers, these elegant all-in-one designs suffered from the "feature creep" that had been detrimental to both the Apple III and the Lisa, becoming too expensive both in design and in expected sales price (Kunkel, 43-4). The concepts were discarded entirely when Jobs was demoted and the president of Apple France, Jean-Louis Gassée, was brought in by John Sculley to be vice president of Apple's product development, a new position to replace much of Jobs' role (Sculley, 280).
Jean-Louis Gassée was no more an engineer than Steve Jobs, but he did not share Jobs' vision that computers should be appliances democratically priced. Gassée's vision was instead of technical power and profit margins; he frequently argued against products that would offer low profits and implemented what he called a "high-right" strategy - on a chart of computer performance to price, he wanted Apple's products to be always in the upper right corner, the most advanced and most expensive. While the Macintosh continued to be advertised as "the computer for the rest of us," among Apple executives slogans such as "fifty-five or die" emerged, referring to Gassée's goal of a 55 per cent profit margin (Carlton, 79-80).
The Macintosh had originally been intended to be very affordable; Jef Raskin had hoped his appliance computer would sell for under $1000 U.S. (Levy, 111). As it developed under Steve Jobs' leadership to include Lisa technology, it became more expensive, but Jobs still fought to keep the price under two thousand dollars. In a boardroom decision, it was introduced at $2495 (Levy, 180). The Macintosh ironically became popular shortly after poor sales led to Jobs' demotion, but this popularity came largely from the emergence of desktop publishing, a business market that could afford to pay more and required even more computing power. Gassée's strategy brought the largest financial returns in the industry by providing increasing technical capabilities at an entry-level cost that was as much as a third higher than that of IBM-compatibles (Carlton, 79). It also reshaped the Macintosh.
Without a guiding vision for computing such as that of Jobs, Gassée encouraged Apple's engineers to guide product design, lavishing attention on them and providing enormous funds for research and development (Carlton, 23). Through this effort by technicians, the Macintosh was transformed, gradually stripped of the technical limitations inherent to Jobs' affordable computer appliance.
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