Technology matures and fashion kicks in...
seattletimes.com
Mac's stylish image polishes Apple sales
by Mark Leibovich
The Washington Post
NEW YORK - Alyson Levin drove up from Philadelphia with friends, counting "Think Different" billboards along the way. "This is a cultural event," said Levin, 19.
John Van Sickle, a sophomore at Emory University in Atlanta, had never seen Steve Jobs in person. He rushed the stage to get a close look at Apple Computer's icon-in-chief, who had just unveiled the company's clam-shaped laptop, the iBook, to an overflow crowd at the Macworld Exposition here last month.
It's the mark of the realm at Apple Computer that when times are good, company trade shows can resemble revival concerts. And times are giddy for the resurgent personal-computer maker known for its quirky industrial designs, cult-like user community and corporate soap operas.
In July, Apple reported its seventh-straight profitable quarter, safely removed from the gush of red ink that marked what seemed to be its death spiral two years ago. Apple's stock price has jumped nearly 50 percent since April to more than $50, reaching its highest levels in six years.
But there's always more to the Apple story than what traditional business indicators can measure. When it's at its best, the company has tapped into emotional rhythms in America's consumer culture, becoming one of the few "lifestyle brands" in a personal-computer realm defined by sameness.
In a sector obsessed with high power and low cost, Apple has provided something else altogether: style. And to the surprise of many, style is selling.
A year ago this month, Apple introduced the hood-shaped iMac computer, whose loud colors ("flavors") have become synonymous with the reinvented company. Nearly 2 million of the machines have been sold in less than a year, Jobs reported. "They've become almost pervasive in our culture," he gushed.
Spurred by the iMac, Apple's share of the retail desktop-personal-computer market has jumped to more than 10 percent, up from 3 percent in late 1997. Jobs, who returned to the company he cofounded after a 12-year absence in 1997, is credited with cutting costs, streamlining product offerings and restoring focus to what had become a disjointed and dispirited operation.
Since his return, Apple has regained its stature as an iconoclast to be reckoned with - or at least studied - as a mass-market phenomenon.
"The revival of the Macintosh is like the revival of the Volkswagen Bug," said Regis McKenna, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Jobs' mentor who spearheaded Apple's earliest marketing and public-relations campaigns in the 1970s. The analogy to cars is apt, he said. Both cars and computers are intricately wired consumer machines whose identities are often defined by cosmetic features.
"People often make their decisions on cars by size and shape, not functionality," McKenna said. "Same with computers."
In his Macworld speech, Jobs marveled at the iBook design features. "Look at the back of these things," he said, turning over a tangerine-colored machine. "The back is more beautiful than the front of the other guys' computers."
Then he fixated on the charger, a ring-like contraption stuck on the back. "This is the charger," he said. "It's really beautiful, isn't it?"
"Killer, killer," an audience member kept saying.
"Apple's new computers look like candy," said Marshall Blonsky. The symbol, said Blonsky, a longtime Apple watcher, is that the personal computer has been domesticated, made friendly, brought to life.
"For the last number of years, beige and black has dominated this industry," said Phil Schiller, Apple's vice president of worldwide marketing. "We feel like we're the only ones willing to go out on a limb and be revolutionary."
This has been an enduring theme at Apple since April Fool's Day of 1976, when Jobs and boyhood pal Steve Wozniak launched the company in a Silicon Valley garage. In the early years, the company flew a pirate flag outside its corporate headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.
Yet there's a delicate line between cherished icon and banished outcast, and Apple has floundered on the wrong side of the divide for much of this decade. Even as its comeback has been widely acclaimed, its fight for survival was painfully chronicled as well.
The company lost nearly $2 billion between 1995 and 1997, suffered calamitous tenures by three CEOs in four years and endured a laughable run of public-relations nightmares - the worst being reports that some Apple Powerbook machines were bursting into flames.
"It got to a point where some people were embarrassed to say they worked at Apple," said Guy Kawasaki, a longtime employee and "chief evangelist" (his actual job title) who left Apple last year to found Garage.com, a Silicon Valley start-up that supports new-technology businesses.
Kawasaki said Apple's evolution under Jobs has been simple. The company has stopped trying to fit into the prevailing PC market and has begun to again trumpet its distinctiveness.
"What's the difference between isolationism and idiosyncrasy?" Kawasaki said. "Steve Jobs is the difference."
Apple's ubiquitous "Think Different" ad campaign is the best example of this, a multimedia celebration of this century's noted pioneers, such as Jackie Robinson and Albert Einstein.
Jobs hired Lee Clow, the advertising executive at TBWA Chiat/Day who created the spots for the first Macintoshes in the 1980s. Jobs bolstered the company's ad budget - to more than $100 million - and personally chose which great thinkers would be given Apple's "Think Different" seal of genius.
"Apple seized on the cliche of differentiation in a world that constrains," said Blonsky. "People love the idea that they're doing something revolutionary, even when they're buying a machine."
If nothing else, Apple has bought itself another shot at relevance, said Howard Anderson, president of the Yankee Group, a technology research firm in Boston. It is broadening its base of users; Jobs frequently points out that one-third of all iMac buyers are new computer users.
Above all, the company has again turned a cold technology tool into a personal statement.
The return of Apple also bespeaks a factor of cultural evolution, Marshall Blonsky said. Personal computers have become standard to life in the United States, to a point where there's now a critical level of trust in the machines. They have been demystified to a degree. Consumers have reached a comfort point, enough that they're willing to concern themselves with more frivolous things, such as color.
"There's a message in the (iMac) colors," said Michael Wolfinbarger, a software developer from Oklahoma.
"The message is, you worry about the color you want; we've taken care of the technology inside." If Apple is healthy, he said, it means individualism is alive. "This is good for the computer industry," Wolfinbarger said.
"It's good for the world." |
