Evolution Of Apple Company

Submitted By lalahaohaoxuexi
Words: 606
Pages: 3

Back in 1976, Apple’s legend started in a small garage. Two young electronics enthusiasts, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, were connected via selling primitive personal computers. Both of them are in their early twenties when they decided to start the company named Apple in Jobs’ garage. The first generation of their personal computer is Apple I, which sold at a unit price of $666(Hill, 2013). They continued to perfect their product and later in 1976, they were introduced to Mike Markkula, a 34 years old, retired millionaire. He soon committed an investment of $92,000 and promised that his ultimate investment would be $250,000(Hill, p2). Apple had a solid foundation by combining Woz’s technical skill, Jobs’ entrepreneurial zeal and Markkua’s social connections. The company kept growing and the Apple II came up in the year 1077. By the end of 1980, “Apple had sold over 100,000 Apple II’s, making the company the leader in the embryonic personal computer industry.
One of the historical moment of a company is definitely the time of its IPO. By the end of 1980, Apple successfully executed an IPO and was generating over $200 million in annual sales. Right after the IPO, Apple announced the launch of Apple III. It was a failure due to its technical bugs. At the meantime, two important projects were in the process at Apple: Lisa and the Macintosh. Lisa, which is originally designed as a high-end business machine and the Macintosh as a low-end one. Jobs pushed his team to rush out the projects in a short period of time which leaded to some arguments internally. Some Apple’s engineers believed that this mission is beyond reality. In 1082, formally executive vice president of marketing at Pepsi joined Apple as CEO. Because Lisa was nowhere near the finishing line, Jobs pushed Mac project. Macintosh was a failure because it lacked some important features including hard drives. Facing the external competitors such as IBM, Dell, it posted its first loss on 1985(Hill, p2). Jobs’ responsibilities and position were stripped by Sculley. In later 1985, Jobs resigned and started his own computer company named NeXT.
Under the management of Sculley, Apple made some strategic changes to fit in the market. Apple’s position in desk top publishing was strengthened. “The period between 1986 and 1991 were in many ways the golden years for Apple” (Hill, p.2). By the early 1990s, Apple faced intense external competitions from Microsoft and IBM. Sculley’s plan