market started to figure this out,
by the end of the year people said
well maybe the IBM PC isn't as easy to use
or is not as attractive as the Macintosh but
it actually does something that we want to be able to do
spreadsheets, wordprocessing and database
and so we started to see the sales of the Mac
tail off towards the end of 1984,
and that became a problem the following year.
Cringely's Third Law of Personal Computing was right again,
to succeed, a PC must have an application
which alone justifies buying the whole box.
The IBM PC had Lotus 1-2-3.
The Mac needed its killer application.
WYSIWYG - another bunch of initials,
from the world of the nerds.
What you see is what you get
so what's the big deal?
Well, it turns out that it's very hard to print on paper
exactly the same image that you see on the computer screen.
Eighty per cent of our brain is devoted to processing
visual data, but that's not the same for computers.
I've been here writing a letter to my Mum
and I'm signing it Bob in 72 point
Times Roman Italic type as befitting myself
and when I tell it to print,
what comes out is a Bob
but certainly not the Bob that I intended.
Until someone invented a way to print
exactly what was on the screen
gui would be, well a lot of hooey.
Apple's problem was the dot matrix printer.
It gave everything a type-writer quality.
But salvation was at hand and
once again it owed a lot to Xerox Parc.
One of Parc's former brains, John Warnock,
had invented a technology that allowed
a laser printer to print exactly,
precisely what was on your screen.
He started a company called Adobe
to market his invention
And what we had figured out how to do
that no-one else had figured out
how to do was drive laser printers.
Within two or three weeks
we had cancelled our internal project,
a bunch of people wanted to
kill me over this, but we did it
and I had cut a deal with Adobe user software
and we bought 19.9 per cent of Adobe at Apple.
The investment paid off.
The power of precise laser-printed images
and a user friendly gui gave birth to a brand new business
Desk-top publishing (DTP).
The spreadsheet had made us all accountants.
Now using break-through software
we could create fancy artwork,
snappy-looking note-paper, even counterfeit money.
The Mac had found its killer application
and would soon become the PC of choice
for any creative business.
It changed my life that one instant
when I picked up the mouse
my whole life changed to building
a career as a computer artist.
The success of desk-top publishing
came too late for Apple's founder.
In 1985 Mac sales were still flat
but Jobs refused to believe the numbers.
He simply behaved as if the Mac was
a hot seller from the start.
The grandiose plans of what
Macintosh were going to be
was just so far out of whack
with the truth of what the product was doing
and the truth of what the product was doing
was not horrible it was salvagable
but the gap between the two
was just so unthinkable
that somebody had to do something
and that somebody was John Sculley.
John Sculley, whom Jobs saw
as his own creation,
presented the board with
his strategy to save the company.
The plan did not include Steve Jobs.
The board had to make a choice,
and I said look, it's Steve's company,
I was brought in here to help you know,
if you want him to run it that's fine with me
but you know we've at least decide what
we're going to do and everyone has got to get behind it.
But he took it as a personal attack,
started attacking Scully in which you know,
backed himself into a corner because he was sure
that the board would support him and not Sculley.
And ehm ultimately after the board talked
with Steve and talked with me,
the decision was that we would go forward
with my plans and Steve left.
What can I say? I hired the wrong guy.
That was Sculley?
Yeah and eh he destroyed everything
I spent ten years working for.
Starting