Corporate focus: 1986-89
Part 3 - Crisis at Apple
4-frogdesign || 5-Corporate focus || Conclusion || Bibliography & links
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At the end of 1989, Jean-Louis Gassée's "high-right" strategy, which had generated Apple tremendous profits through the late 1980s, had clearly been too strongly followed for too long. A decrease in profits and a 20 percent fall in stock price in the usually busy Christmas fiscal quarter seemed to signal a need for change. In January 1990, Gassée resigned and his authority over product development was divided by several successors (Carlton, 117-129).
Gassée had not followed a vision for product design like Steve Jobs before him, instead giving his own engineers control so long as the profits and performance remained high. As the technology journalist Jim Carlton later said, "The patients were running the asylum" (Carlton, 84). Without a unifying vision, Gassée's impression on Apple's products would not hold for long after his departure. The physical design of Apple's desktop computers in 1990 express Gassée's economically pragmatic concerns for technical performance and corporate success, but they also more lastingly manifest Jobs' belief that technology should be accessible. Whereas Jobs' influence was still visible in Apple's products in a diluted form, Gassée's would prove to be more unsteady and ephemeral, if initially quite harmfully unrestrained.
At the time of Gassée's resignation, Apple's product line included three aging Apple II models sold as consumer products. The IIc+, an slightly upgraded version of the IIc, would be discontinued later that year. The IIgs would be sold until the end of 1992, and the venerable IIe would remain a few months longer, but the Apple II technology had clearly been surpassed. Among the Macintosh products, there were the Plus, SE, SE/30, IIx, IIcx, and IIci. The most expensive and powerful Macintosh yet, the IIfx was to appear that March. Of these machines, only the Macintosh Plus was affordable to most consumers, selling for about $2000 (Carlton, 103). The other computers were marketed expensively towards the corporate market for which they had been designed.
The difficulty that resulted in Gassée's departure and a series of following restructurings was that Apple was becoming less differentiated among computer manufacturers. In 1990, Microsoft released version 3.0 of Windows, its first popular imitation of the Macintosh "look and feel," narrowing by an arguable amount Apple's lead in accessibility. Meanwhile, the Snow White language that had helped manifest Apple's technology was infused into the standard physical form even while it was filtering down to PC manufacturers. Snow White details were increasingly appearing on PCs, unsurprisingly since Apple had so long gained unique attention for its industrial design (e.g. Snow White lines used on a Dell computer as seen in an ad in Byte, May 1989, inside front cover; zero-draft case used on an IBM computer as seen in an ad in Byte, Nov. 1990, p. 16-7). As Apple's products became less differentiated, their perceived value lowered. In late 1989, it first became clear that they would not prosper long selling almost exclusively expensive computers with nearly unchanging physical designs.
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