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from Chapter 29
When Jobs finally presented the idea, the board was not thrilled. Gateway Computers was going down in flames after opening suburban stores, and Jobs’s argument that his would do better because they would be in more expensive locations was not, on its face, reassuring. “Think different” and “Here’s to the crazy ones” made for good advertising slogans, but the board was hesitant to make them guidelines for corporate strategy.
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In October 2000, near what he thought was the end of the process, Johnson woke up in the middle of a night before one of the Tuesday meetings with a painful thought: They had gotten something fundamentally wrong. They were organizing the store around each of Apple’s main product lines, with areas for the PowerMac, iMac, iBook, and PowerBook. But Jobs had begun developing a new concept: the computer as a hub for all your digital activity. In other words, your computer might handle video and pictures from your cameras, and perhaps someday your music player and songs, or your books and magazines. Johnson’s predawn brainstorm was that the stores should organize displays not just around the company’s four lines of computers, but also around things people might want to do. “For example, I thought there should be a movie bay where we’d have various Macs and PowerBooks running iMovie and showing how you can import from your video camera and edit.”
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Jobs liked to tell the story—and he did so to his team that day—about how everything that he had done correctly had required a moment when he hit the rewind button. In each case he had to rework something that he discovered was not perfect. He talked about doing it on Toy Story, when the character of Woody had evolved into being a jerk, and on a couple of occasions with the original Macintosh. “If something isn’t right, you can’t just ignore it and say you’ll fix it later,” he said. “That’s what other companies do.”
When the revised prototype was finally completed in January 2001, Jobs allowed the board to see it for the first time. He explained the theories behind the design by sketching on a whiteboard; then he loaded board members into a van for the two-mile trip. When they saw what Jobs and Johnson had built, they unanimously approved going ahead. It would, the board agreed, take the relationship between retailing and brand image to a new level. It would also ensure that consumers did not see Apple computers as merely a commodity product like Dell or Compaq. |
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