Whilst almost all of the world’s business computers use Microsoft Windows, Office and Teams, it is not the biggest supplier of IT services and technology in the world.
In terms of market capitalisation, Apple is not only hundreds of billions of pounds more valuable than Microsoft, but it is also the biggest company in the world of any kind, let alone technology.
Many businesses rely on the iPhone as part of their business communications, particularly for people in executive positions. It is difficult sometimes to even quantify how much the iPhone changed business mobility, eventually leading to the hybrid and hotdesking-focused offices that are in vogue today.
Despite this, one place where Apple has famously always struggled is in the field of business technology. They can make mobile phones so popular that business leaders will inevitably choose them over BlackBerry and Android devices, but they have always struggled to make popular business computers.
The reasons why this is the case span over four decades, to the very start of Apple’s difficult road to the top.
Gravity-Based Tech Support
In the 1970s, Apple struck gold for the first time with the Apple II, essentially a completed version of the hobbyist favourite Apple I home computer.
Whilst the Apple II did become popular in American schools, much like the similar Acorn BBC Micro, it never managed to bridge the gap into business use despite being fairly popular with small businesses.
At the time, computers running CP/M were the norm, and IBM was developing what would become the Personal Computer, so Apple decided to try and capture the market with a dedicated business machine of their own.
Named the Apple III, it was filled with many of the innovations characteristic of the late Steve Jobs, including a full 80-character display and full typewriter-style keyboard intended to be popular with business users, but this innovation also led to one of the most infamous design flaws in computer history.
Steve Jobs hated the noise generated by a lot of computers, which used cooling fans to channel the intense heat generated by the chips away from the circuitry and outside of the case itself, so he insisted that the computer had no fans and no vents.
This required a gigantic heat sink made from aluminium, but a mistake in the design and manufacturing process meant that it was too small to properly dissipate the heat.
Not only did this make the desks the computers were placed on outrageously hot, but it also caused chips to dislodge from the circuit boards and pop out, completely ruining the computer and thwarting a productive day of work.
Attempting to regularly save your work on an Apple III was not much better, given that the heat would often melt the floppy disks.
Rather infamously, Apple tech support would recommend dropping the Apple III from six inches above the desk to force the chips back into position.
A Name Only NASA Could Love
Their next attempt was the highly innovative Apple Lisa project, one of the first mass-produced computers with a graphical user interface.
Steve Jobs believed extremely strongly that the future of business computing was to be found with a graphical user interface. Rather than typing in commands and interacting with a computer as a glorified typewriter, the Lisa was meant to make computing much easier.
To a degree it did, with NASA using the computers for years to manage space missions, but it was otherwise seen as an extremely expensive failure that did not offer enough to businesses to justify the cost.
What did not help in this regard was that Steve Jobs had been forced off of the project as part of one of many power struggles at Apple during this time, and he got his revenge by developing the Macintosh.
This computer also had a graphical user interface, but it was much cheaper, much more focused and much more successful than the Lisa.
However, the Macintosh was also not successful with businesses, and one final attempt to make it a business machine was a cataclysmic disaster.
Oh No! More Lemmings!
Part of the reason for the success of the Apple Macintosh can be attributed to 1984, a very famous advert shown during the Super Bowl and established Apple’s reputation as a computer of the counterculture; rather than buy what everyone else has, buy a Macintosh instead.
Apple wanted to try a very similar approach the following year when selling Macintosh Office, a business suite intended to make Apple’s counterculture machine into the ultimate networked business solution. It failed dramatically, not least because of the oft-forgotten follow-up advert which insulted all of the potential customers.
