Waching daily Dec 31 2018

How Apple Started, Grew & Became Successful

There are thousands of quotes on success and one thing the majority of them all have in

common (if you read them right) is: Innovation+ Hard work = Success

Not many companies are the embodiment of this ideology like Apple Inc.

The name is even more popular on Google Search than the fruit after which it was named.

A Titan of the technology industry that is valued at about $1 Trillion, its market cap

makes it larger than the GDP of each of 183 out of the 199 countries for which the World

Bank has GDP data.

Some of the notable ones include Turkey, The Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, and

Sweden.

With feats as grand as this, it is no wonder that Apple Inc. is synonymous with success

and a good reference for any tech startup company.

HOW Apple STARTED

This story began on 1 April 1976, when Apple was founded by two college dropouts by the

names of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak who brought to the new company a vision of changing

the way people viewed computers.

Jobs and Wozniak wanted to make computers small enough for people to have them in their

homes or offices.

Simply put, they wanted a computer that was user-friendly and portable.

Their first office was in Jobs' garage where Wozniak designed and built the Apple I that

was sold without a monitor, keyboard, or casing but which they decided to add on in 1977.

The Apple II revolutionized the computer industry with the introduction of the first-ever color

graphics.

Apple sales jumped from $7.8 million in 1978 to $117 million in 1980, the year Apple went

public.

By the end of the 1970s, Apple had a staff of computer designers and a production line.

The company introduced the Apple III in May 1980 in an attempt to compete with IBM and

Microsoft in the business and corporate computing market.

Jobs and several Apple employees, including human-computer interface expert Jef Raskin,

visited Xerox PARC in December 1979 to see the Xerox Alto.

Xerox granted Apple engineers three days of access to the PARC facilities in return for

the option to buy 100,000 shares of Apple at the pre-IPO price of $10 a share.

Jobs was immediately convinced that all future computers would use a graphical user interface

(GUI), and development of a GUI began for the Apple Lisa.

In 1982, however, Steve Jobs was pushed from the Lisa team due to infighting.

Jobs then took over Wozniak and Raskin's low-cost-computer project, the Macintosh.

A race broke out between the Lisa team and the Macintosh team over which product would

ship first.

Lisa won the race in 1983 and became the first personal computer sold to the public with

a GUI, but was a commercial failure due to its high price tag and limited software titles.

In fact, many of you today may not have heard of the Lisa at all as compared to the Macintosh.

A DIFFERENT DIRECTION

In 1983, Wozniak left the company due to dissatisfaction and a diminishing interest in the day-to-day

operations of the company and Jobs hired John Sculley to take over as CEO.

He would later regret this move because Apple's board of directors would eventually instruct

Sculley to contain Jobs and limit his ability to launch expensive forays into untested products.

Rather than submit to Sculley's direction, Jobs attempted to oust him from his leadership

role at Apple.

Sculley found out that Jobs had been attempting to organize a coup and called a board meeting

at which Apple's board of directors took sides with Sculley and removed Jobs from his

managerial duties.

Jobs resigned from Apple and founded NeXT Inc. the same year.

Wozniak released a statement that the company had "been going in the wrong direction for

the last five years."

After Jobs and Wozniak's departure, the Macintosh product line underwent a steady

change of focus to higher price points, focusing solely on profits as opposed to Jobs approach

to producing products aimed at the consumer market.

Newer models selling at higher prices offered higher profit margins.

Although some worried about pricing themselves out of the market, the high-rise policy was

in full force by the mid-1980s, notably due to the new Executive, Jean-Louis Gassée's

mantra of "fifty-five or die" referring to the 55% profit margins of the Macintosh

II.

The policies may have seemed like a good idea but they began to backfire in the latter part

of the decade as new desktop publishing programs appeared on PC clones that offered some or

more of the same functionality as the Macintosh but at far lower prices.

Apple Inc. lost its monopoly on this market and estranged many of its original customer

base who could no longer afford their high-priced products.

The Christmas season of 1989 was the first in the Apple's history that saw declining

sales and led to a 20% drop in Apple's stock price.

Gassée's had to resign from the company in 1990.

Later that year, Apple introduced three lower cost models, the Macintosh Classic, Macintosh

LC and Macintosh IIsi, all of which saw significant sales due to pent-up demand.

In 1991, Apple introduced the PowerBook, replacing the luggable Macintosh Portable with a design

that set the current shape for almost all modern laptops.

The same year, Apple introduced System 7, a major upgrade to the operating system that

added color to the interface and introduced new networking capabilities.

It remained the architectural basis for the Classic Mac OS.

The success of the PowerBook and other products brought increasing revenue.

For some time, Apple did incredibly well, introducing fresh new products and generating

increasing profits in the process.

The magazine MacAddict named the period between 1989 and 1991 as the "first golden age"

of the Macintosh.

However, the 90s weren't as solid for Apple as the previous decade was, as Apple's lower

cost models outsold their high-cost models.

So Apple did something different, they made the mistake of creating identical products

at different prices.

It got worse as they experimented with the then unsuccessful franchise of consumer products

like cameras, CD players, and television appliances.

Jobs' Return

In a dramatic event, Apple Inc. acquired Jobs' company, NexT and got Steve Jobs back to Apple

on July 9, 1997.

It is worthy to note that even Apple experienced failure.

It happens to the best of us but the company didn't go down without a

fight.

It got back up and restructured.

Apple Inc. began its return to glory when Jobs collaborated with Microsoft to bring

Microsoft Office to the Mac and then proceeded to create a new custom line of products for

multimedia and file editing.

Jobs announced that Apple would begin producing Intel-based Mac computers in 2006.

On January 10, 2006, the new MacBook Pro and iMac became the first Apple computers to use

Intel's Core Duo CPU.

By August 7, 2006, Apple made the transition to Intel chips for the entire Mac product

line—over one year sooner than announced.

The Power Mac, iBook, and PowerBook brands were retired during the transition; the Mac

Pro, MacBook, and MacBook Pro became their respective successors.

Apple also introduced Boot Camp in 2006 to help users install Windows XP or Windows Vista

on their Intel Macs alongside Mac OS X.

On April 29, 2009, The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple was building its own team

of engineers to design microchips.

Jobs with incredible foresight announced he would focus on mobile devices.

In 2007, the company sold 270,000 iPhone units during the first 30 hours of sales.

The device was called a game changer for the industry.

Apple would achieve widespread success with its iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad products,

which introduced innovations in mobile phones, portable music players and personal computers

respectively.

Apple Inc.

Now

As at August 2018, Apple shares increased to $207 for the first time making it the first

American public company to top $1 trillion in market cap.

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