Yes It Is, It’s True: Apple is a double rags to riches story

I read with great interest a story this week about Apple Computer becoming the first company in history to earn a market value of $1 trillion.

It wasn’t always like that. Though Apple indeed has been one of the most iconic tech businesses, it was on the ropes in the 1990s and virtually left for dead. Things were so bad that a co-worker of mine went to Best Buy and was told by a salesman she shouldn’t buy anything Apple because it soon was going out of business.

Such a comment, though thankfully horribly untrue, was believable back in those dark days. Apple fired co-founder Steve Jobs for allowing rival Bill Gates to steal tech secrets and the other founder, Steve Wozniak, had resigned to pursue more humanitarian opportunities, such as teaching.

Apple’s share of the computer business was in free fall and may experts were predicting its demise. Fired CEO Gil Amelio published a tell-all book about the horrible and unprofessional working conditions in which everybody showed up dressed in sneakers.

An interesting made for TV movie, “The Pirates of the Silicon Valley,” came out and focused on Jobs and his battles with Gates. He sneered at Gates, “We’re better than you.” And Gates retorted, “It doesn’t matter.”

The film was gearing up as a “rise and fall” of the inventors of the personal home computer, Jobs and Wozniak, who indeed came up with the invention in a garage in 1976. Woz was the techie and Jobs perhaps one of the most business savvy and marketing geniuses of all time.

But the two had a falling out. Jobs continue his success with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984 with an operating system that Gates was said to have envied beyond belief. He eventually found crafty ways to pilfer enough material to start his own Windows systems and quickly began to dominate the field.

I first worked on a Macintosh in the fall of 1987 when I was editor of the Allegan County News & Gazette. After a couple of years, I was sold on its simplicity and intuitive nature. I persuaded the powers that were, the Brothers Jacobs, at J-Ad Graphics in Hastings, to give up on Mycro-Tech and switch to Apple. Then in 1994, I bought a Macintosh Performa 550 for the awful price of $2,199 for personal home use.

Not long afterward I became terribly worried that indeed, Apple was going belly up and the Macintosh would be relegated to the dust bin of history.

But old pal Jon Gambee told me that Apple had reached a deal to bring back Steve Jobs. Gambee was so pleased he hinted that he might purchase some cheap Apple stock. He didn’t and he has paid dearly for his reticence since.

Jobs almost immediately introduced the funky-looking iMac, which puzzled the experts because it did not include a floppy disk drive. Many pundits promised this would be the end for Jobs and Apple because back then floppy disks were commonly used for transferring data.

Then Jobs introduced the “fruity” iMacs he put on TV ads with the Rolling Stones’ “She’s Like a Rainbow,” perhaps an antidote to the Stones’ “Start Me Up” ad for Windows

Then the hits just kept coming. Jobs started to have company conventions to announce new products and everybody who was anybody just had to be there to see the next great innovation. These events introduced iTunes, the iPhone, the Mac Mini, the flat-screen iMac and even a high tech watch.

As a result, Jobs was being hailed as a genius, an innovator and he was voted the single most influential person in the tech revolution that dominated American culture in the last quarter of the 20th century and even into the first decade of the 21st, even after Jobs’ untimely death several years ago.

Today, Apple celebrates a milestone no other business has ever achieved. But, as I noted near the top of this treatise, it wasn’t always like that.