Simplify. Richard Koch
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it generated was huge. Advertising Age and TV Guide both later voted it the greatest commercial of all time.
“Big Brother” was a thinly veiled reference to IBM, commonly called “Big Blue.” In October 1983, Business Week had opined that the battle for market supremacy in personal computers “is already over. In a stunning blitz, IBM has taken more than 26 percent of the market in two years, and is expected to account for half the world market in 1985. An additional 25 percent of the market will be . . . IBM-compatible machines.”1
At the public launch of the Macintosh on January 24, 1984, Steve Jobs, chairman of Apple, attacked IBM directly. After detailing the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of the much larger company, he built towards his climax: “It is now 1984. It appears that IBM wants it all . . . and is aiming its guns at its last obstacle to industry control, Apple. Will Big Blue dominate the entire computer industry? The entire information age? Was George Orwell right?”2 Jobs had the crowd of journalists and commentators hollering and cheering. Then came a rescreening of the commercial, which generated a standing ovation. It was a dramatic launch for what turned out to be a rather special machine.
The build-up to 1984 had started in the early 1970s, when computer technology began to change and a wave of simplification began, as the microprocessor made computing faster, cheaper, and easier to operate. In 1975, the MITS Altair became the first mass-produced personal computer kit, but it was much less sophisticated — as well as much cheaper — than the many microcomputers that were emerging at the time. For $495, the hobbyist got a pile of parts to solder to a board; even assembled, it was pretty primitive.3
One of those hobbyists was Steve Wozniak; another was his friend, Steve Jobs. In 1975 they began working on the Apple I, a step up from the Altair, but still an unprepossessing machine. The Apple II, a much neater product, quickly followed. The first real packaged computer, it came in a sleek and friendly plastic case modelled on the Cuisinart food processor; and it could be plugged in and used straight out of the box. Its simplicity made the computer a general consumer product for the first time: you didn’t need to be a geek to use it.4
Jobs’ biographer, Walter Isaacson, says Jobs “liked the notion of simple and clean modernism produced for the masses . . . he repeatedly emphasized that Apple’s products would be clean and simple.” In Jobs’ own words, “We will make them bright and pure and honest about being hightech . . . that’s our approach. Very simple . . . the way we’re running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.”5
Yet the real breakthrough came not with the Apple II but with the work being done at the Xerox PARC research labs at Palo Alto. Jobs secured an invite for himself and his team at the end of 1979 and he was amazed by what he saw. Up to that time, all computers had used command lines that required some operator skill, and there were no user-friendly graphics. But the Xerox engineers had invented the “desktop” — a screen that could have several documents and folders on it at the same time, represented by icons. A device they called a mouse was used to access the one you wanted with a simple click. When he saw this demonstrated, Jobs was captivated. “THIS . . . IS . . . IT!” he exclaimed. “It was like a veil being lifted from my eyes. I could see what the future of computing was destined to be.”6
All of these features were included in the Xerox Star. Launched in 1981, it was the first recognizably modern PC. But the Xerox Star retailed at $16,595, and only 30,000 of them were ever sold. If it was to trigger a revolution, the Xerox Star needed to be simplified.7
The Apple Lisa, introduced in January 1983, was the first computer on which users could drag a file across the desktop, drop it into a folder, scroll smoothly through a document, and overlap a series of windows. Through Jobs’ famous WYSIWYG — What You See Is What You Get — the Lisa also enabled users to print off exactly what they saw on the screen. The Lisa 2, introduced a year later, cost $3,495 — about a fifth of the price of a Xerox Star for a greatly superior machine.8 The Macintosh was a further advance — it cost $2,495 and had many charming features that made it both easy and fun to use, including a superb graphics package and a great variety of different fonts, documents, spreadsheets, and other templates.
In truth, the first Mac was far from perfect. Its gorgeous user interface required far more memory than it possessed. Over time, however, the necessary improvements were made, and, as we’ll see later, the appeal of the Mac to a certain type of user — broadly creative types and those who revel in good design — made it a huge long-term commercial success.
But Jobs was not a price-simplifier. One of his early co-conspirators on the Mac project — and the man who named the machine — was Jef Raskin, a young, brilliant, and highly opinionated computer scientist. Raskin wanted to build a computer for the masses, to go into every home — a utopian and preposterous idea, it seemed, at a time when fewer than one in a hundred homes owned computers. His ideal was a machine with a keyboard, a screen, and the computer itself in one unit, priced at $1,000. If Jobs had supported this notion, Apple might have become the Ford Motor Corporation of computers. He could have done so, which would have made him a price-simplifier. But he had a different idea, as Walter Isaacson explains:
“Jobs was enthralled by Raskin’s vision, but not by his willingness to make compromises to keep down the cost. At one point in the fall of 1979 Jobs told him to focus on building what he repeatedly called an ‘insanely great’ product. ‘Don’t worry about price, just specify the computer’s abilities,’ Jobs told him. Raskin responded with a sarcastic memo.”9
A power struggle ensued. Jobs prevailed; Raskin left the company. In 1984, the Mac was priced at a 25 percent premium to the rival IBM PC, an inferior machine in everyone’s eyes, except for the majority of buyers.
Jobs was not obsessed with price or with the creation of a mass market for his machine. He simplified principally to make his PC better for the user. He made a device that he himself wanted to use. He was not wholly uncommercial: he simplified so that his machines were easier to produce and therefore cheaper; and he introduced some stunning cost savings relative to the Xerox Star. But he reduced cost and price only when doing so did not compromise his main objective, which was to make a fabulous computer. Ease of use, art, and usefulness made his machine a joy to use. Price was important too, but markedly less so. Ever since, no Apple device has been sold primarily on price.
Therefore, Jobs is the first of our second breed of simplifier — those we call proposition-simplifiers — because the overwhelming innovation and advantage lie in the proposition of the product or service, not in its price. In Jobs’ own phrase, the product has to be “insanely great.” In our phrase, the product must be a joy to use; it must have a palpable “wow factor.” Jobs spoke for all the proposition-simplifiers we will meet in this book when he said, “products are everything.”10
By relating the stories of Ford, IKEA, and McDonald’s, we showed that the overwhelming benefit brought to customers by price-simplifiers is a massive price reduction of anything between 50 and 90 percent. This reduction is absolutely essential for price-simplifiers. We then showed that Ford, Kamprad, and the McDonald brothers attempted, where possible, to improve the ease of use, usefulness, and aesthetic appeal (art) of their products, provided this did not conflict at all with the overwhelming aim of a low — and continually lower — price.
With proposition-simplifiers, the position is exactly reversed. Their absolute priority is to make the product or service not just a little better, but a whole order of magnitude better, so that it is recognizably different from anything else on the market. The Macintosh, the iPod, the iPad, and the Apple watch all met this criterion: the proposition was either a great improvement on an existing product or else a totally new, unique creation. It had to be insanely great, a joy to use. At least one of the dimensions we specified as optional extras for price-simplifiers — ease of use, usefulness or art — must be present in a proposition-simplifier’s new product or service. In fact, usually two or three of these benefits must be present; but whether it is one, two or all three of these advantages, they must transform the proposition.
In