In 1997, Steve Jobs walked up to a whiteboard at Apple, drew a 2x2 grid, and told the room that Apple was going to make 4 products. Everything else, gone.
Apple was making more than 70 at the time.
The company was 90 days from bankruptcy.
He had just come back to Apple more than a decade after being thrown out of it. Apple had bought NeXT, his second company, the December before. A board fight had pushed out the existing CEO over the summer. By September, Jobs was in charge again. Interim CEO, the title said. Nobody believed the "interim."
The company he walked into was almost dead. Apple had lost $1 billion that fiscal year. Sales had collapsed 30% in a single quarter. Microsoft had just invested $150 million to keep the company alive.
The company was making 11 different desktops, 4 laptops, multiple printers, cameras, scanners, the Newton, the Pippin game console, and a small empire of clones it had licensed to other manufacturers. Most of the products lost money. Most customers couldn't tell them apart. Jobs reportedly said he couldn't figure out what to recommend to his own friends and family when they asked him which Mac to buy.
So he drew the grid. Consumer and Pro across the top. Desktop and Portable down the side. One product per box. 4 products total.
The Newton was killed. The Pippin was killed. The QuickTake camera was killed. The printer division was killed. The clones were killed, with Apple paying around $100 million in stock to shut down Power Computing, the biggest licensee, just to end the program. Thousands of employees lost their jobs along with the products they were working on.
The 4 products that remained were the Power Mac G3 in the pro corner, the iMac for consumer desktop, the PowerBook G3 for pro portable, and the iBook for consumer portable. The "i" stood for internet, but it also stood for the simpler thing Jobs had drilled into the company. One thing per quadrant. No more.
The first one out the door was the iMac. Bondi blue, all-in-one, no floppy drive, priced at $1,299. Apple sold 800,000 of them in the first 4 months. The product Jobs had drawn in one corner of a whiteboard grid was the thing that brought the company back from the dead.
A year after the grid, Apple posted a $309 million profit, its first profitable year in nearly a decade.
The iPod arrived in October 2001. 1,000 songs in your pocket, $399, one product. iTunes followed. The iPhone arrived in 2007. The iPad in 2010. Each one was the same story. A single product per category, designed by first deciding what it wasn't going to be.
By the time Jobs died in 2011, Apple's market value had gone from around $3 billion when he returned to over $350 billion, on its way to becoming the most valuable company on earth.
People remember the products. They forget the killing.
The iPod was approved while Apple was killing dozens of other gadget concepts at the same time. The iPhone was approved while Jobs was killing internal projects right up to the moment of its launch. The iPad sat in his office in prototype form for years before Jobs let it ship.
He said it cleanly at a developer conference around that time.
"People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of many of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things."
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