January 13, 1997

At a time when Apple Computer most needed to send a
message of confidence and clarity, its performance
at last week’s Macworld exposition in San Francisco
offered little evidence that it had begun digging itself
out of its very deep hole.

Macworld is a semiannual event where thousands of loyal
Apple customers and software developers gather to pore
over the Macintosh industry’s latest offerings. This
time, they also came to gauge whether Apple would
survive: Another gloomy financial forecast had sent
Apple’s stock price plunging the week before.

Instead of providing hope at this critical
juncture, Apple’s opening-day presentation — usually a bellwether
for the company’s direction — was a disjointed disappointment,
indicating that Apple remained a company in chaos.

True, technology presentations from the research labs –
always a high point — were well received. Frank
Casanova, director of Apple’s research lab and an
accomplished stage presence, drew wild applause from the
throng in the Moscone Center as he demonstrated a new
suite of software technologies.

The marvels included a text-to-voice e-mail reader and a
remarkable “document summarizer” that could find the
most pertinent sentence in a long essay. Casanova also
showed a product in development called the Apple Data
Detector. These detectors were able to isolate World
Wide Web, e-mail and postal addresses from a document –
in this case, a newspaper article — as well as phone
numbers or other such data that the program was able to
extract, then automatically file all of them in a data
base.

But despite the utility and appeal of these and many
other advances that Apple announced, Casanova was given
less than 15 minutes to showcase them during a rambling
three-hour presentation led by Apple’s chairman, Gilbert
F. Amelio.

Amelio chose to devote far more time to a seemingly
random sequence of photo opportunities — with the
company founders Steven Jobs and Stephen Wozniak, actor
Jeff Goldblum, former heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali
and others. With the exception of Jobs, none had a
discernible connection to the task at hand: convincing
customers and developers that the Macintosh was still a
safe bet.

Apple’s emphasis on glitz rather than progress, and its
lack of a discernible marketing message, has plagued the
company over the last year and often made it an industry
laughingstock.

In Apple’s present state of discombobulation, how could
anyone not laugh at its product tie-ins with the
movie “Mission: Impossible”? Or with the film
“Independence Day,” in which an Apple Powerbook computer
— which in real life had been recalled because of
quality problems — was supposed to have saved the world
from alien attackers?

Such marketing messages do not merely miss the mark;
they do not even recognize the target.

In an attempt to address some of Apple’s current
problems, Amelio spoke disparagingly last week about the
company’s former, often confusing “strategies du jour.”

What new strategy of the day did he then impart? Aside
from trumpeting its newly announced acquisition of Jobs’
Next Software, Apple offered no clear message.

The company did announce a contest, called ‘Give Your
Dreams a Chance,” for users to create their own
television ads for the Macintosh. Considering Apple’s
failed marketing efforts to date, this may not be a
terrible idea.

But such whimsy seemed irrelevant in light of no
announced plan to stimulate sales, no indication whether
Apple’s quality problems had been solved, and no clear
strategy for bringing back software developers who have
strayed into the more lucrative market for Windows
programs — all of which seem critical to the company’s
existence.

Even the recent NeXT deal, viewed through the blurry
Macworld lens, began to look like a desperation move. At a
news conference, Apple’s chief technical officer,
Ellen Hancock, conceded that the deal happened so quickly
that her company had spent $400 million for NeXT without
deciding whether Apple would build Rhapsody, its code
name for the merged Apple-NeXT software operating system
— not expected for 18 months — on NeXT’s
Unix-based operating system, or on Apple’s own Macintosh
software.

Considering the outcry from computer-industry analysts,
critics and customers over Apple’s need for a clear new
direction for its system software, this was a colossal
missed opportunity. But missed opportunities seem
epidemic at Apple.

Most recently, for example, Amelio said that the
company’s recently forecast $100 million to $150 million
loss was attributable to a slow retail market during the
crucial holiday selling season.

But why wasn’t Apple able to capitalize on the industry’s biggest
news of the season: the later-than-expected availability of
Intel’s MMX multimedia chip, which is still a month or more from the
market?

Nearly every computer columnist, both in the national
and the trade press, had advised consumers to wait until
after Christmas to buy an Intel machine because of the
capabilities that MMX would provide. What better time to
start an advertising campaign to sell Macintoshes, which
remain the computer of choice for multimedia developers?

As the only real competitor to Microsoft and Intel,
Apple seems to have lost sight of the reality that its
technology is still alluring to customers and
developers; it certainly has forgotten how to sell it to
them.

If the company were to gain some clarity of purpose, it
might also be able to regain its relevance in today’s
marketplace. But right now, Apple still seems far from
the light at the end of its own tunnel vision.

Denise Caruso

Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company