How Apple Went from Underdog to Cult in Six Design and Innovation Strategies from the Early Days

“Apple had to make real the dreams people didn’t know were dreamable.”

In 1982, Apple hired German-American industrial designer and inventor Hartmut Esslinger to overhaul the company’s design strategy. He created the Snow White design language, which would come to define Apple, and turned the Silicon Valley underdog not only into a global force of design and innovation, but also into a singular culture — an aesthetic cult, even. Esslinger’s design work went on to be included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum and the MoMA. When Jobs resigned from Apple in 1985 after a power struggle and founded NeXT — the logo for which another iconic designer created — Esslinger joined him. When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 as interim CEO, Esslinger followed and was tasked with advising Jobs on a strategy for lifting Apple out of its sunken market position and establishing the company as a true leader of innovation in technology and design.

In Keep It Simple: The Early Design Years of Apple (public library) — a first-of-its-kind collaboration between Esslinger and Jobs, chronicling the gestational period of Apple’s greatness in more than 380 photographs and illustrations — Esslinger shares the six recommendations he made to Jobs in 1997. What’s striking about them isn’t only how prescient they are — from cultural phenomena that Apple didn’t capitalize on directly, like social networks, robotics, and augmented reality, to specific technologies that Apple brought to market, like Siri, AppleTV and the iPhone — but also how clearly they map onto the strategies of countless contemporary startups that have attempted to copy, with varying degrees of success, Apple’s aesthetics and ethos.

Esslinger itemizes the strategy:

1. Make Apple’s design a game changer again … by returning to the classic values of “simple is best,” invigorating the products through fresh ideas, and re-focusing the overstretched product lineup.

   (Jonathan Ive’s and Thomas Mayerhoffer’s sensational iMac design would become the urgently needed game changer, and Jonathan Ive also would reconnect Apple’s design approach to its Snow White roots. Steve made the right move and had Jonathan Ive working as an Executive Vice President directly with him. Again, leadership in design was at the top, and ranked equally with all other top executives at Apple. . . . There is no other way to make design the core of a human-centric company.”

2. Make peace with Microsoft and Bill Gates. The Macintosh platform had been eroded to low single-digits market share, and Apple needed to tap into the life-saving software suite, Microsoft Office. Therefore Steve had to repair Apple’s relationship with Microsoft. In the “peace talks” that followed, Bill Gates actually came to Steve’s family home in Palo Alto and, during several walks around the block the two men forged the beginnings of a working relationship. Afterward, Microsoft invested $50 million in Apple. The announcement of their alliance at the MacWorld conference in Boston was greeted with boos from Apple’s die-hard fans, but both the alliance and Microsoft’s support built trust in the marketplace — and helped Apple’s battered balance sheet.
3. Make Apple a leader in “digital consumer technology” by converging “consumer electronics” into digital technology and media content. Convergence already was a reality; computing and communication were converging, along with media content from information to music to movies, with the Internet and the Worldwide Web providing an asynchronous distribution platform. Within the new marketplace these advancements were creating, Steve’s biggest concern was Sony, [which], as a leader in micro-electronics that also owned Sony Music and Sony Studios, could be Apple’s most dangerous competitor. But … Sony was asleep at the wheel, as was Samsung and a number of mobile phone companies such as Motorola and Nokia, who were expected to move into the emerging market of universal digital convergence. These companies made good and well-designed products, but they didn’t understand that they actually were putting computers into people’s hands, which could enable them for a totally new experience and culture. . . . We advised Steve to take on the competition with a product strategy focused on people’s real needs and proven innovations — a strategy that would avoid stupid risks. Instead of looking for inspiration in the developments of its existing and potential competitors in the space of consumer technology — whether Dell, HP, Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Samsung, Canon, or others — Apple needed to focus on creating new ways to exploit the potential of proven technology to fulfill people’s unrealized dreams. In fact, Apple had to make real the dreams people didn’t know were dreamable.
4. Create a Virtual Apple “community.” By connecting its customers, followers and fans and enabling them to communicate with each other, Apple could establish its brand beyond technology, as part of a lifestyle. In that environment, innovation would be defined by what people could achieve with an Apple product, rather than by the product’s level of advanced technology.
5. Out-innovate and integrate television, audio and communication into a new paradigm. We projected that digital technology was going to replace analog line-interlace standards in television (NTSC, SECAM and PAL) and so Apple should create its magic and put away with the primitive user interfaces that still reigned in those technologies. Sound had already made the digital leap, both in 44.1KHz CDs and 92KHz PCM tapes.
6. Explore and pioneer smart physical-virtual devices and useful robotics. We encouraged Steve to make Apple interfaces “human,” with controls activated by gestures, speech and emotional sounds. We also recommended that Apple form strategic partnerships for co-creation with MIT and other top universities around the world with programs in mechatronics, nano technology and advanced brain research.

It’s easy to see how this foundational vision shaped Apple’s output, both creative and cultural, in decades to come. Esslinger adds a note on the toxic cultural conceit that doing well and doing good are somehow diametrically opposed, a myth perhaps most famously discredited-by-example in the story of Jim Henson. Esslinger writes:

Yes, Steve also achieved stunning financial success, but it is his cultural contribution that makes his life story truly unique. Apple, like no other company, has brought world-class design and pristine branding to a new mass market — a market it actually created. And Steve takes his place in that small and exceptionally rare collection of entrepreneurs such as James Watt, Henry Ford, Robert Bosch, Thomas Watson Jr. and Walt Disney, who converted a technological revolution into a humanistic vision — one that resulted in fundamental social and cultural change. Nobody can copy the genius of Steve Jobs, but … what might this world be like if all of us followed his advice to “stay hungry and foolish”?

Keep It Simple, which follows Esslinger’s Design Forward, is an excellent read for anyone interested in the history of innovation and in design as a force of culture and commerce. Hear Esslinger discuss his collaboration with Jobs, including the secret to resolving disagreement, in this excerpt from Debbie Millman’s altogether fantastic Design Matters interview with the design legend:

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The Secret Life of the Radio

From Marconi to the microwave, by way of revolutionary technology, legal battles, and magical materials.

“When correctly harnessed, radio can be as emotional, as funny and as satisfying as the best motion pictures or television shows,” Ira Glass has said. Indeed, the radio is a medium imbued with equal parts nostalgia and timeless mesmerism — there is something singular, something especially enchanting about how its invisible waves entrance us with their sounds and stories. But how, exactly, does the radio work, and how did it come to be? That’s precisely what Tim Hunkin and Rex Garrod explore in this delightful vintage episode of the TV series The Secret Life Of Machines, written by Hunkin:

Pair with this animated 1937 guide to how radio works, this illustrated guide to making great radio starring Ira Glass, and these gorgeous vintage covers for Radio Times magazine.

For some fantastic post-wave modern radio, treat yourself to Design Matters by Debbie Millman, 99% Invisible by Roman Mars, and Radiolab by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich.

Thanks, Alex

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Ada Lovelace, the World’s First Computer Programmer, on Science and Religion

“Everything is naturally related and interconnected.”

Science and religion have long been pitted as diametric opposites, and yet some of humanity’s greatest minds have found in science itself a rich source of spirituality — there’s Albert Einstein’s meditation on whether scientists pray, Richard Feynman’s ode to the universe, Carl Sagan on the reverence of science, Bucky Fuller’s scientific rendition of The Lord’s Prayer, Richard Dawkins on the magic of reality, and Isaac Asimov on science and spirituality. But one of history’s most poignant meditations on the subject comes from the English mathematician and writer Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (December 10, 1815–November 27, 1852), better-known as Ada Lovelace — the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron and commonly considered the world’s first computer programmer.

Portrait of Ada Lovelace by Lisa Congdon for our Reconstructionists project. Click image for details.

In a 1844 letter to her Somerset neighbor, the experimenter in electricity Andrew Crosse, found in Betty A. Toole’s altogether fantastic Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: A Selection from the Letters of Lord Byron’s Daughter and Her Description of the First Computer (public library), Lovelace — the child of an era still characterized by extreme, all-permeating religiosity that governed nearly all aspects of public and private life — considers the spiritual quality of science, inseparable from the teaching of (at that time, religious) philosophy.

I am more than ever now the bride of science. Religion to me is science, and science is religion. In that deeply-felt truth lies the secret of my intense devotion to the reading of God’s natural works… And when I behold the scientific and so-called philosophers full of selfish feelings, and of a tendency to war against circumstances and Providence, I say to myself: They are not true priests, they are but half prophets — if not absolutely false ones. They have read the great page simply with the physical eye, and with none of the spirit within. The intellectual, the moral, the religious seem to me all naturally bound up and interlinked together in one great and harmonious whole… There is too much tendency to making separate and independent bundles of both the physical and the moral facts of the universe.

Whereas, all and everything is naturally related and interconnected. A volume could I write on this subject…

Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers is an altogether illuminating read, shedding light on the life and mind of one of history’s most deserving yet unsung pioneers of the technologies that shape our lives today.

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Dame Steve Shirley, the World’s First Freelance Programmer

“Few things in life are as solid as they seem.”

When she was five years old, Dame Stephanie “Steve” Shirley, born Vera Buchthal, fled Nazi Germany as a child refugee, escaping certain death and plunging into a life that would show her a quieter yet oppressively persistent kind of discrimination and injustice. A girl with a strong passion for mathematics, she had to transfer to the boys’ school to get a proper education, where she first became aware of her gender’s second-class status — but she, a voracious reader, took refuge in the school library and devoured countless books spanning every imaginable field. As a young woman drawn to the computing industry, she saw that signing her name opened no doors, so she adopted the nickname Steve and began signing as “Steve Shirley.” Suddenly, doors swung open.

Steve Shirley went on to become the world’s first freelance programmer and founded the software company F.I. Group in 1962, one of the UK’s earliest startups. It was a revolutionary company, writing software only — an outrageous proposition at the time. It was managed and operated by highly skilled female engineers (“We hired men. If they were good enough.”), who worked from home — also unthinkable amidst the era’s gender biases and social norms. And yet they forged forward, forever changing the course of entrepreneurship and women in technology. When F.I. was eventually floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1996, it earned hundred of millions of pounds. Today, she is bringing that same zest for change and betterment to her work in philanthropy.

This fantastic short film, produced by Google as part of a series highlighting women’s involvement in the early days of computing, tells Dame Steve Shirley’s remarkable and heartening story:

The fact that I almost died in the Holocaust means that I’m very motivated to make sure that each day is worth living, that my life was worth saving… I had built a determination that I was not going to let other people define me, to break through, to build something new, to not be put off by the conventions of the day.

In her memoir, Let It Go (public library), Dame Steve further elaborates on this disposition, tracing how her childhood experience of being sent away into safety by her German parents and raised by kindly strangers in the UK shaped her outlook on life, work, and philanthropy:

I have known failure and heartbreak as well as success, but I have never quite lost sight of two life-defining ideas – both of which I can trace back to my arrival in England all those years ago as a terrified, weeping child refugee.

The first is the conviction that even in the blackest moments of despair there is hope, if one can find the courage to pursue it. Sometimes the worst is less overwhelmingly awful than we fear; sometimes the right attitude can create good even from life’s most terrible situations.

My second big idea is the matching conviction that, even though I ostensibly lost everything when my parents were forced to send me away, I was not just the victim of bigotry and cruelty. I was also the fortunate beneficiary of the unearned generosity of many people: the Jewish and Christian activists who set up the Kindertransport, the Quakers who kept the project going when it ran out of money, the ordinary people who chipped in with the various tedious administrative tasks that allowed the project to function, the Catholic nuns who helped to educate me, and the quiet, middle-aged, nominally Anglican couple who took me in.

Without my being fully aware of what was going on or why, a large number of good-natured strangers took it upon themselves to save my life. It took me some years to digest this fact and its implications. But, once I had, a simple resolution took root deep in my heart: I had to make sure that mine was a life that had been worth saving.

I may not always have succeeded in this aim. But I have at least learnt lessons along the way: about how to make things happen, how to deal with setbacks and how to turn the most improbable dreams into realities.

She reflects on her separation from her birth parents:

Looking back today, from the other end of a life that has been exceptionally rich in nearly every sense, I can see that most of my subsequent achievements can be traced back to that unnatural separation. It marked the beginning of a narrative far more interesting than the one that had originally been scripted for me. But it also taught me, with the ending of my first life, a profound lesson: that few things in life are as solid as they seem; that tomorrow will not always resemble today; and that wholesale change, though often terrifying, is not necessarily synonymous with catastrophe.

Let It Go goes on to trace just how this extraordinary woman turned “improbable dreams into realities” — a story of bravery, determination, and triumphant ingenuity against even the most inauspicious of odds.

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