Maybe You Should Get A Mac

2006 was huge. First, Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel, and rebranded the PowerBook as MacBook Pro. So one challenge was reassuring customers that iMacs and MacBook Pro with Intel were still Macs. Keeping the same basic form factor helped with this change. Looks like a Mac, must be a Mac. These machines also featured a new version of iLife. Having new software and new hardware at the same time provided the opportunity to look at marketing Macs as a whole. We developed an ”On every Mac” section to communicate the benefits of the whole system, including the OS.

Soon after, Apple released the Boot Camp beta, software that allows Macs to run Windows natively on the Intel hardware. The totality of new software and new hardware and the ability to run Windows for the few pieces of non-native software someone might need meant that all serious blocks to considering a Mac were gone. Microsoft provided an opening with Vista. As long as people were thinking about upgrading to a new system, they might as well consider a Mac, and rising security concerns gave people another reason to look. Plus, you could even run Vista on Macs. Heck, some people were reporting it ran faster on an Apple than other PCs. And lots of Windows customers were now Apple customers thanks to iPod and iTunes. Once the entire product line was released on Intel, we developed a Mac ad campaign, finally.

I'd been in the Mac press when Windows 95 came out. Apple's response at the time was beyond lame. The year before, I went to an event at the Apple campus, called "Multimedia you can use." It featured a bunch of studies touting how great Apple was for including CD-ROMs on all machines. And a big showcase of FireWire, which wouldn't actually show up on machines until the Blue and White G3 five years later. You could just watch the whatever mind share Apple had left wafting out the door. At any rate, Get a Mac was a chance to say hey, look over here, for real: this time, Apple had great products and great ideas (and me!) I don't think anyone predicted that Vista would be so poorly received.

Campaign Thoughts

Philosophically speaking, I detest ads or any campaign that tries to get me to want something without any basis in reality. Sure, emotional pleas work and much advertising attempts to sway you based on irrational thoughts. Cars, beer, even pharmaceuticals, all want you to connect to the product from a basis other than intellectual thought. A pretty field with fun music makes you want to be in the car, scantily clad women will be yours if you drink some Coors, medical ads increase your anxiety so you have to ask your doctor if there’s something wrong with you. (ALL medical ads should be banned from television. And also public transit. I freaking hate it when some campaign plasters the floors with pills. Just say no to drugs.)

Moreover, I'd had enough with the idea that just because you say something is true people should believe you because you said it way of doing things. We got into war in Iraq because the president said we had to, amongst other things. No, perhaps I had had enough of the throw facts out the window and destroy all scientific knowhow in the government, such as EPA libraries, that does not agree with your opinion. Now, I studied speech act theory in college, I get that words are powerful things. But unless your words are backed up by reality, they will eventually create structures only of air. Hot air. Perhaps I am too wedded to logic. Maybe I've just seen one too many ads pasted in airports that was supposed to make me feel all goopy about a product I knew sucked. Perhaps I'd read one too many issues of Adbusters.

At least the emotional part of things was taken care of by Chiat. They get the humor thing. At any rate, one thing I noticed from press releases and keynotes, that worked with iPod and iTunes, was calling people music lovers. Not consumers. Lovers. And it’s true. Almost everyone loves music. So I deliberately used love in ”Why you’ll love a Mac.” I don’t have an objection to using emotion at all, but I like it coupled with tangible thought. And some of the ”reasons” are much more emotional based - good design isn’t necessarily a completely rational reason to like something. But you can put it in rational terms. Not having ads or logos cluttering up the front of a device makes it easier to focus on your own work. Intuitive buttons and interface let you focus on your own work, and when something just works, you spend more time on your own stuff, instead of fixing things. Most of the reasons are rational thoughts you can empirically test the truth value of. And freaking computers are based on logic. Customers can test out whether the thing does what you say. The reasons add up to something you love, rather than trying to get you to love something for no reason. The latter can work, the former will last longer.

This campaign, and iPod campaigns worked because of great products. Because hundreds of people at Apple want to make better and better products, and there’s a standard of what better means. There is so such a thing as objective beauty. And eventually, if you stick with it, objective reality wins. I don’t have a grudge against Microsoft, I just want better computers that do what I want. They are trying to counteract the Mac vs. PC ad campaign now, and all I have to say to that is that they won’t succeed until they have a better product. Mac vs. PC works, not only because of the brilliance of Hodgeman and the folks at Chiat, but because you can test the truth. And it’s also not really a OS X vs. Vista campaign. The sum of a Mac is bigger than its parts and was designed to work together. You just can’t say that about the PC. So until the experience of a PC is empirically better than that of a Mac, anything Microsoft tries to do to sway you emotionally just won’t work. And as I said, I don’t really have a grudge against Microsoft. When there’s a better PC that runs Vista, I’ll be glad to try it. (Part of that challenge would be to let me feel like I own my computer. And that guy on stage at one of your developer events who said only girls want simpler controls: lose him.) And there is a MS product I like, XBox, as long as it's Rock Band. Oh, and the parts of Vista that use the new text engine do look better. For years, I could never even look at a PC, it made my head hurt. (But as an update - this campaign is kindof intereststing, I've seen it on sci-fi rewind. But, um, pulling in all of those images dynamically is bandwidth intensive, and it makes your "I'm a PC" video choppy, and sometimes not play at all. I'm sure you wouldn't want anyone making a comparison to your OS.)

You can't fool all of the people all of the time

It's kind of like Republicans right now. They got away with saying a lot of things for a long time, and almost built a "permanent Republican majority" (monopoly). When you're winning everyone loves you or is at least too tied to the way things work to say anything. But as soon as some scales fall off the eyes, it becomes a feedback loop in the other direction. Obama sure does act like the Mac guy, all being nice to PC, while gently pointing out his flaws. Or even just genuine disagreements about the right way of doing things. I suppose it's an unfair comparison, MS hasn't accused Apple of being unAmerican. And Macs and PCs coexist way more peacefully than anyone possibly can in Rush Limbaugh's world. Competition is healthy in both arenas. Switch didn't work as well as Get a Mac for this more partisan reason, it made too much fun of PC, and not as nicely. It was trying to prove a lot more then, too. I would hope that the days of marketing a Sarah Palin with no substance won't succeed anymore.

The campaign was again a department-wide effort. I could go into details, but suffice to say, everyone on my team contributed words, arguments, and personality to the site, and practically all the web and graphic designers were in on it, too, at one level or another. But, it was no Think Different. People aren't putting up posters of John Hodgeman on cubicle walls in droves, like they did with the Think Different folks.

Moving forward

On a technical level, some fun things our designers created: performance bar charts made using CSS and standardizing on 900 pixels. The performance charts in particular made it easy as a content creator to revise numbers without needing to bother a designer to fix an image. Though come to think of it, performance chart aren't as necessary when you are running the same hardware as the competition. The division's new VP also pushed for more rich media. This year was also spent getting ready for iPhone, making sure there was logical space for it, culminating in a top level redesign in 2007.

Making tools for these kinds of people

Once the challenge of the campaign was over, and Intel Macs transitioned, and iLife expounded upon, and Leopard previewed, and iPods refreshed, the year was nearly over. I came up for air to find Republicans propagating the usual crap blaming Democrats for 9/11 and furthering the divide in this country, and the vice president lobbying for the suspension of Habeus Corpus, a concept that has served freedom well for centuries. I found myself with more and more to say that had nothing to do with Apple. Apple wasn't doing anything wrong anymore. (Mostly.) And I'd trained a replacement.

It was fun, exhilarating, and addicting to be a voice for Apple for a critical point it its history. One thing I've learned about developing your voice as a writer is that if you have something to say, you should say it. And pay attention to it, and mine was telling me there wasn't much more to say (that was difficult or challenging) at Apple. In fact, all you need are the words iPod, Mac, and iPhone, set in Myriad. The products speak for themselves. A lot more needed to be said elsewhere.

The Think Different campaign enticed me to go to Apple. While there were problems I thought needed fixing, I wouldn't have gone had I not though I could make a difference, I bought into the campaign. The company had no products to sell, this was a stopgap to keep loyal customers happy. After I got to Apple, people in my department had discussions about heroes. You can tell a lot about someone by who their heroes are, we said. The people who brought the Mac into existence are some of my heroes. It is one shame about being the leader now, instead of an underdog clawing up, that you can't really say things like that anymore. Well, Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, amongst others, are my heroes, too. They created a system I don't want to see die, either. And I left because you really just can't say things like that while part of a multinational corporation. Putting in the odd comment about citizen journalism in the iLife site isn't big enough. Legally, people do have a fiduciary duty to try to increase shareholder value. And when Karl Rove is a customer…

No respect for the status quo

You certainly wouldn't want to annoy half your customers by asking them to think, which is far more offensive than a timer. (I am such a brat.) Seriously though, if you try to offend no-one you'll eventually end up pleasing nobody, either. We are all going to have to pitch in and fix the damned mess from the last eight years, with Iraq, the economy, and climate change. Maybe a timer is in poor taste to the 30% of people who still like Bush, perhaps it's even damaging to trying to heal the country. Making fun of the people you will need to help make solutions work everywhere isn't necessarily the best idea, though it can be soothing to a maddened consciousness. Why should the people who have been called traitors for eight years be the responsible, compassionate ones all the time? Why should they turn the other cheek all the time? Oh, right, because it's the right thing to do, and the only thing that will create lasting change.

However, a serious discussion of the problems facing us might not be a bad idea. Not just posters and two sentences that you hope will inspire people to learn more about your heroes. A discussion of why those people on this page were in the campaign, and what they stood for, and why they matter, and why their work is still important. And maybe that they, too, saw America, or their own country, as imperfect, and wanted to make it better. And that some ideas are dumb ideas, proven over the last eight years to have serious logic and logos flaws, that need to be pruned off the body politic, and composted, after a thorough examination and understanding of why they are such terrible ideas.

And science, and the scientific method, and its results, and the technology needed to support it, are going to be 100% necessary to get us out of this deep, deep hole. And that when you have proven yourself to be so incompetent for so many reasons, maybe you should suck it up and stop listening to yourself, and instead listen to the people who were actually right for the last eight years. Progressives and their San Francisco Silicon Valley values. We won't eat your babies. We just imagine a better world for them. Doesn't even matter if the world right now is absolutely perfect. You can always improve. In fact, our founding fathers wanted us to. It's in the constitution: "Promote the progress of science and useful arts…"

It's a pretty good set of ideals, why they did it: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." See, it's an American ideal to not see the present as perfect, to provide for the common Welfare (totally not socialist), to promote Liberty and Justice. And think about generations to come in posterity. It would be totally sweet if you joined us November 4th, not just some nebulous some day. There's a metric ton of work to do. Together. (And voting is the very least you can do to honor our founding fathers, and their vision.)

Enjoying A Nicely Purring Engine; Or Cat

Nothing game-changing happened in 2005, instead the year was notable for a steady stream of great products. It was the beginning of freakish attention, though, with millions of customers now watching your every move. At some point in 2005, Apple went from underdog to market leader. It was gratifying but surreal to experience the idea that customers loved products, all of your and your colleagues' hard work paid off, the decisions and direction were right. All of a sudden everyone wanted to be a part of the iPod company.

Some highlights: Mac mini provided the first "headless" Mac, to make it easier for people with investments in monitors and other equipment to move to Mac. It also let people turn them into silly things like millennium falcons. A challenge was to encourage this excitement without being too corporate mothership about it. You shouldn't really suggest that people void their warranty. We also updated the Switch site and moved it under Mac OS X. The team created a guide that explained how to switch to Mac using your iPod as a hard drive. This is still a sticking point, as it seems you can have a genius do it for you at an Apple store.

Sites with style

Technically, we took the opportunity with every new product to overhaul its site with CSS. This made everything both a lot more work and a lot less work. QuickTime 7 and Mac OS X Tiger were released simultaneously. The Apple web team had an organic growth policy on web sites - let content expand and contract as needed, rather than artificially filling up pages with nothing simply because of a bullet point. Well, as one of the oldest products still available, QuickTime had sort of overgrown, and in some parts had been subsumed in iTunes. We took the opportunity to do a lot of pruning, and gave it a fresh face. An outside design firm did much of the heavy lifting, with my oversight. 

Dickens would be proud

Concurrently, we updated the Mac OS X Panther site to CSS for the Mac OS X Tiger site and updated every page with Tiger information. This was ably managed by one of my hirees, though I did do some of the more technical writing. Together, I think these two sites had at least 300 pages between them. And another member of the team managed the Final Cut Studio launch at the same time as all that craziness. So make that 500 pages at the same time. (I exaggerate.) Sometime after that launch the design geniuses figured out how to get all the images to print nicely. All sites had white backgrounds up until that time because of print issues. Smaller resellers (and sometimes even large ones) would use printouts of the web site to sell products. The sites needed to look good printed. I was so happy when we made our first all-black site.

I believe it was also iTunes 6 where we could finally write about features of the music store on software pages. That is, when there were still international sites that did not have a music store, we had to have a version that did not reference the music store. Up until this time we had separate sections for each idea. We also began featuring music store content on the pages, which was not possible earlier for the same reason. Loved Daft Punk and Eminem in iPod commercials. (Though there was some controversy with Eminem.) And another U2 ad. Have such a soft spot for them.

Words fail

Katrina.

Sunday, Bloody, Sunday

Colleagues spearheaded switch to CSS over tables. I rejoiced as the amount of markup went back to 1995 levels. This meant we could be more productive, and updating site did not require painstaking, error-prone coding. It did mean we had to recode every site. Rather than do it all at once, we chose to do it at each product release. And it made working on those releases so much better. I could be in the html page while the designer worked on the css template separately. I wrote better with a template, not in word, and the designer designed better when he had content to work with. Go figure.

As an individual contributor, the iPod mini and iMac G5 sites were some of my finest work, with 30" Cinema Display and Logic Pro 7 not too far behind. About mid-year, I asked for the responsibility of managing product launches and product launch writers, to ensure a cohesive output. I believe the Tiger Sneak Peek was the first result of the new team, with iPod Shuffle following in the new year. (The team responsible had been instructed to illustrate the product next to a pack of chewing gum and were feeling snarky.)

The company was required to publish the battery site for legal reasons, but I was happy to be given the directive to make the site more useful and informative than it needed to be. In other iPod news, I really liked my black U2 iPod. So punk rawk.

Can't believe the news

I was getting more and more distracted by current events. I even pointed this out to the CEO during a comm meeting. Telling me to vote for John Kerry wasn't terribly helpful. I did take some time off to get out the vote in Sparks, NV. It was depressing, and as I've noted elsewhere, not helpful if you don't have enough voters. Or a democratic leadership that actually led. I mean, how is it that you could justify torturing anyone? Really. What part of the golden rule do people not understand? And even if, maybe, you treat, maybe, two people very badly, don't freaking try to make up a legal argument for it that ends up poisoning the entire military. Have the President step up, take responsibility, pardon the people that followed your orders, then dare someone to impeach you. Don't let hundreds of innocent people get tortured. What part of The Sermon on the Mount did you not listen to? Of course, arguing against torture in a country that finds no compunction against tasering a 71 year old man is sadly a lost cause. I couldn't believe in 2004 that there was actually a debate about whether torture was a good thing. Of course it's bad. It gives bad information and corrupts the people doing it. Gah. And John Kerry made no mention of this. Just stood up like a doofus saying ready to serve. Thank god Howard Dean started the 50-state strategy.

The company was hitting its groove, executing well with solid products, but I just couldn't stand what was happening to the country. I suppose it is small solace to think that we wouldn't even know about Abu Ghraib without advances in digital cameras and copying.

Panther, Processor, Power

The writer whose work I aspired to moved to Google. I admired his ability to write about technical matters in an engaging, outrageous, easy way. I tend to be more serious. Ok, that's not completely true. I really wanted to make one of the Mac OS X Server page headlines "IP Freely." I will admit to more than one childish pun and silly footnote. But that wasn't body copy. Perhaps it was just his voice. He called it carpentry. I get that more now, perhaps I took things very seriously because it mattered a whole lot to me that a better solution not die. It didn't have to win, but I wanted it to exist, badly.

Powerful elegance

As for lightheartedness and all around silliness, I believe it absolutely necessary for the transmission of complex thought. That is, Apple created innovative technologies itself and popularized other technology used in its products. A large portion of what I communicated were new concepts to not-geeks. New things are hard. Innovation is hard. Change is hard. But if you're in a good mood, it's easier to make new connections between neurons. I think there's a seratonin release or something when you laugh. And then something difficult becomes easier to understand.

At any rate. I admired that writer. It was awesome to learn new tricks from someone. I then wrote the sites for hardware launches as well as the operating system and other software. That included the G5 processor and Power Mac. Apple released a web browser Safari, and iSync. My pictures of Salzburg and the Paris city hall ended up on the Final Cut Express site. The Xserve product manager reminded me that I could use polysyllabic words on his site. In fact, in 2003, with the launch of the G5, the company made a serious effort to gain some mindshare in the enterprise HPC market, and released software to aid in grid computing. While this is not as sexy as iPods, it does have astounding affects. Some problems, like global weather, or mapping potential smallpox outbreaks, can only be done on hardware this size. Having a broad market-share in consumer also would allow Apple to innovate in these markets. XServe was also much better for the environment than the then current competition, less power requirements not only required less power, but also produced less heat, and thus less power for air conditioning. I may want my jet pack, but I don't want my jet pack to destroy the ozone layer, too.

Simple progression

Mac OS X Panther continued the upgrade problem, the preview version was complicated - we needed to still have information about the product that was on current computers, but also get people excited about the new version. For the release site, I created an AppleScript that took the 150 new features and put them on the relevant page. We could continue to edit them until almost the night before. Some people wondered why we didn't have a content management system that would display info dynamically. First, that system would have to be localized, which wasn't going to happen. Second, a new release product would generate immense amount of server load in the first week. Content in straight text files put less strain on servers than a database application. Panther was a solid upgrade to a great product in Jaguar. It was kind of nice to lose the fur. But, as I said, it shed all over the apple.com. We found Jaguar fur in odd places for years.

Two steps backward

In other news, I could not believe that we went to war with a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. And that it was so poorly executed, that so many warmongers profited from no-bid contracts, and that some of the failure was due to Republicans not wanting people to serve who did not agree with them ideologically. And that people who disagreed were called unpatriotic. I just could not  believe that in war waged by a democracy the President actively discouraged participation from half the population. At some point, I told myself though that getting angry was not the solution. That encouraging creativity through technology was still the long term solution. That letting people block my own creative output would be letting them win. 

I still desire ease of voice.

C'mon, You Know You Really Want To Switch

The spring of 2002 was focused on supporting the Switch campaign, to reinforce the first real Mac ads since Mac OS X was released. And the first real ads that focused on the benefits of the OS over Pentium snail ads or iMac colors. This was also the web team's first effort using Myriad instead of Garamond. Myriad had been developed for iPod packaging as well as retail displays. It's really a much better font for those uses. I'm not sure how great it is at setting type you actually want people to remember. That is, I find as a writer that it does not have enough personality in it to feel like I'm saying anything with it. Or easy hooks to help your eye read. Looking at the Switch headlines, they just felt too strong. Well, not strong, but even. But not my call, I'm just a writer, not a designer. And I do think they were perfect for packaging as well as retail signs and motion graphics. And even on products. It doesn't need to be loud, or draw attention to itself, it just is, and usually on the back of the product. Garamond looked so last century, I concurred with that, I just wanted a different font for headlines.

Switch

The switch effort took the whole Apple.com team. There were the folks uploading quicktime ads, editing customer stories and so on. I managed the reasons to switch to Mac, the answers to blocking problems, and overall site navigation. Everybody contributed something to the final output. However, there still were perfectly good reasons for people not to switch to Mac. The effort we did was good work, but other changes would need to happen before the Mac could be considered head to head. Performance was one, but I blame Myriad. Basically, you can only write one to three word headlines in Myriad. We'd been spoiled by Garamond into verbosity. Have I mentioned Myriad. It may have been an improvement over Garamond, but not in every way. (Note: Myriad evolved by 2006 into a lighter weight and we used gray text for Get a Mac).

At some point, too, I got into an argument with a copy editor over "Macintosh computer" vs. "Mac" on the web. I think it was because this copy ended up in retail. She kept saying it was a trademark, I kept saying nobody says that, it's not cool to say Macintosh computer. I think the company also gave up on Mac OS X. Everyone said OS X. Why fight it?

Even so, this was the first real unified effort with television, retail, and web to tell a coherent story about the Mac since the CEO returned to the company. It took years for Apple to decline in its technology leadership, years for it to turn the product around, and it would take years of steady execution, and iPod, to take back a mind share leadership role. Change is hard. Anyone thinking Obama can turn things around overnight is fooling themselves. It takes leadership. It took years of work by dedicated, talented people to actually get people to consider the Mac again. It will take years, likewise, to clean up all the crap from the last eight. Maybe in 2020 we'll have a perfect vision.

Store

Summer 2002 gave Macworld New York and the SoHo store opening. Some of my pictures of that event ended up on the site, but sadly archive.org no longer has them. That store showed off the attention to detail the company is known for. It's one thing to be able to edit a web site after a launch if you make a mistake. You can't really re-cut glass from the Czech Republic or Italian stone if you screw up. The Chicago store has a green roof. I wish more Apple stores had them or solar panels.

 

Stellar

The Jaguar launch brought with it the problem that plagues every software upgrade. You have to both market the product to new users and convince current users to upgrade. Plus we had to integrate the fur. Man, that thing shed all over the site. But wow, what attention to detail. And having fun. I mean, who'd put fur on their box? The company also wanted to appeal to Windows and UNIX customers without using language that only long term Mac users knew. And this would be the first release that was broadly targeted to everyone, not just the early adopters. Once Jaguar was released, we had to go back and update the Switch site with new information. Did it again for Panther. And boy, maintaining those lists of peripherals that just worked...Ugh. Tables. Would have been much better in CSS.

2001: The Odyssey Ends

After wandering and meandering for much of the nineties, in 2001, Apple did three things that would forever change the fortunes of the company (for the better): Mac OS X, iPod/iTunes, and retail stores. After 2001, the company released very little that was crappy.

Mac OS X was like the games problem only bigger. That is, developers were asked to take a chance that Apple would succeed, given a shaky history, and invest time and mind share in an untested platform promoted by a company that still might be going under. Customers were asked to buy hardware that had no software. Fortunately there was a transition technology that allowed a lot of old software to run, Classic, but the platform would not succeed until there were developers writing software for it. Developers would not write software until there were people to buy it. So we used the web site again to thank the early adopters, and profile the folks who leapt on board.

21st Century OS

I managed the Mac OS X web site from 10.0 through Tiger. The system was clearly not finished upon initial release (the lack of DVD burning is a glaring, oft-cited example). The company had to get the system out the door, but at the same time could not release something that was unusable, it had to work for customers buying a new Mac. The engineering feats were amazing. One, port NeXT to PowerPC. Two, create a whole new user interface layer. Three, have most non-OS X applications run in an emulation layer. Four, add a graphics subsystem with integrated 3D. Five, update developer tools to have programs run natively without complete rewrites as well as work using NeXT technology. Six, no heinous yucky awful bugs.

Only at version 10.1 did it become usable for the majority of people. For this wider audience, we created a "What you can do" section on the site. Even so, that focused more on technical feats than easy intuitive software. Case in point: we featured Image Capture for photos, when really, that was the underlying technology that iPhoto would be built on and not for everyday person use. There was still not a huge range of software. (Read: Photoshop and Office hadn’t been released yet.) So we focused on markets that didn’t need those tools: UNIX software and bioinformatics. Gradually the Mac took over UNIX geeks, at least on personal development laptops. Bioinformatics was helped by both the UNIX underpinnings and OpenGL. Gradually the company launched consumer software that made its products more useful standalone. iMovie, iTunes, iDVD, iPhoto.

Ground Control

iPod and retail stores contributed to Apple's success in well-documented ways. It's fortuitous that Apple could make risky moves when everyone was just trying to hold on: 2001 was also part of a larger downturn in the economy. That year, Enron and Reliant manipulated energy in California, causing blackouts for millions. Granted, it was partially due to a bad deregulation system, but it was one that Republicans had been pushing for years. A president barely legally installed did nothing. The Californian economy rivaled France at the time. I couldn't believe that we'd be screwed with to make political points and someone else a huge amount of money. Our slowdown was a cause of the country's slowdown. That president did nothing again when terrorists struck. A childhood friend of my sister's from church camp, Alicia Titus, was one of the flight attendants. 

That probably has little to do with Apple, except to say that people were focused on other things besides Apple. It did influence how I curated the games site. I refused to promote the military recruiting tool game (I didn't care that it was a simultaneous release), and also did not want to overly promote any of the war games that took place in the middle east. I also lost my taste for bloody games. I had lots of fun playing games with blood in them, notably Myth. But they became much less fun when I could imagine someone I knew exploding, or even thousands of people who had nothing to do with her death exploding, or millions having their homes exploded and left homeless for no good reason. I did do my best not to let it influence boycotting all violent video games, as it's not for me to make choices for other people. But my heart did go out of it then. I think my heart was also broken seeing how easily the country was lead into war in Iraq. Afghanistan, I can at least understand. 

The Right Stuff

Mac OS X, iPod, and retail laid a foundation for unrelenting improvement and fantastic future products. They were not in themselves product category winners at release. But the core principles at the heart of each were intensely well thought out, well executed, and nearly flawless. Just about everything the company is doing today can be seen as an extension and evolution of the three. And at the same time, as with a building foundation, it would be very difficult to change the direction of any of these today in any huge way. You can knock down the walls, add drapes or paint, perhaps install new landscaping, but those bricks aren't going anywhere. They were damn fine bricks designed by a cadre of brilliant people who cared about making great things. I might suggest that if another company had a lot of money in the bank, and wanted to change what it's doing, an downturn like this would be a good time to make huge risks, as people won't be under as much scrutiny.

Hey Look: Shiny Thing Over There

While the iMac saved Apple’s butt in 1998 and 1999, it was a band-aid. The company had lost one billion dollars at one point in 1996 or 1997. By mid-2000, sales slowed, for several reasons. First, overall tech spending was down as people no longer needed to fix the Y2K bug, and the Clinton Internet incentives were winding down. Second, Apple had released the Mac Cube, which while gorgeous, had some technical and price limitations preventing profitable acceptance. Third, iMac was getting long in the tooth. Fourth, uncertainty over the release of Mac OS X, delayed several times. Apple released the public beta of Mac OS X mere weeks before reporting terrible 4th quarter results.

I moved to the web team after working on the Game Developer's Conference to more directly impact consumer communications. Not only was I a web geek at heart, but it was the only place at the time where the company communicated all of its products in one place, and the first place customers went for an impression of new products. Resellers, too, would often use the Web site, instead of official data sheets. I first worked in the hot news area, covering events and publishing stories. I also learned the Apple voice from a master communicator and apprenticed on various product launches. We continued to support games and game developers, and also began hosting developer trailers for games, the first of which was for Blizzard. Overall, 2000 would be a difficult year, as people needed to meet holiday gaols, but also get ready for Mac OS X.

Bungie sold themselves to Microsoft that year. Which annoyed me - I got them into a Stevenote and this happens? Later people used "halo effect" with regard to people buying Macs thanks to good iPod experiences on Windows. I propagated the phrase for other reasons. My first product writing was the Apple Pro Mouse paper supporting the launch at Macworld New York. The  mouse replaced the "hockey puck" round mouse introduced with iMac. The company decided a week before launch that it needed a white paper. I wrote it and made up a bunch of illustrations.

Fading savior

Apple kept up improving iMac, adding FireWire and creating iMovie. It also made different colors to keep it exciting. Summer colors were white, red, and green. The accompanying ads featured "White Room" and "It's Not Easy Being Green." Definitely, cute, but not exactly changing the perception that the Mac market was full of old hippies. To make Macs relevant to a new generation, you'd have to think different. Nothing wrong with old hippies, they're my heroes, you just need to make new customers while keeping the old.

During Macworld New York, I was really snarky about it to my new VP. I'd respected his taste, as when he was head of marketing at VW, finally a car commercial was targeted at me, playing Trio's Da Da Da. He agreed with me about the iMac music, and later that fall I found myself leading a group focused on the youth market in a broader marketing brainstorm effort. I'm more of an industrial, electronica fan. We proposed a few things, among which were more current music, including Propellerheads, U2, and Eminem. We also made a movie illustrating the fast pace of current art and trends in movies, magazines, music, and more. (Hoodies with retro 70s Apple logo never saw the light of day. Still think those would be cool.) I'm not sure how well it went over, as that VP was fired shortly after our project was complete. Shame, I'd really transferred to that department to work under him. We had decent leadership after that, but no VP until 2005. At the same time, many of our recommendations ended up in iPod commercials, either as a direct result, or merely the zeitgeist.

Cubism

Apple released the G3 Cube in 2000. Some of why I love Apple comes from the phrase "For the rest of us." I've been told by someone who worked on that campaign but isn't with the company, that originally, that phrase referred to more the idea that you didn't have to be a command line wizard to make the thing go. For the rest of us who don't think like that. It had no larger societal meaning. Sorry, to my pre-teen ears, and 1984 eyes, I found it to have a populist meaning and to perhaps know what George Orwell was actually saying. And maybe, too it was for the rest of us who don't have $50,000 to spend on a mainframe (the original Apple). For the rest of us who don't have that kind of money to drop on tech. This may sound a bit hypocritical when Apple is the "luxury" computer company. But, there's a difference between buying something that's merely expensive, and buying something quality that lasts. My sister wrote papers on my SE II more than ten years later after I got it. And Apple develops a lot of pro-quality technology that ends up as a much cheaper consumer offering over time. But the Cube was a foray into a luxury offering, it was not for the rest of us. The company still makes this occasional mistake. iPod Hi-Fi was an example. Upon initial briefing, I asked the product manager "Who is going to buy this thing? Stanford students? Berkeley kids won't." (I'm a Cal grad. I had no idea the product manager was a Stanford alum.) It's not actually a bad question to ask, who is your audience. If you don't know who it is, other than yourself…

Again, I joined Apple to do consumer marketing. To make technology accessible to ordinary people. To transmit my joy of making stuff to others. To make easy to use computers accessible and relevant to the next generation. To make sure computers that were made for ordinary folks actually worked for ordinary folks. Mostly, the company was on the right track, and executive decisions were really about making technology affordable, accessible, and useful. Philosophically, I enjoy the interplay of truth and beauty, and Apple seemed the only company interested in both. Some Apple marketing was timeless, but bits needed refreshing. Regardless, its marketing succeeded with great products, and rang hollow with things that were not quite up to snuff. 2000 was even harder than 1999 as the company and customers were waiting on Mac OS X. Shiny objects were not distracting enough.

Other failures Power to the people

I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. It didn't really matter in California, but I was mad at Al Gore. He didn't seem to be articulating any Democratic ideals and ended up focused on lockboxes. And I loved his book on the environment, and didn't hear any of his passion on the subject in that election. If only he'd just spoken his truth. (Or figured out a way to get the media from repeating a lockbox video ad infinitum.) Yeah, that's what made me mad. That politicians couldn't say what they meant and get elected. I went into a funk after the Supreme Court debacle. But thought it more important than ever that tools of production be in the hands of the people. So that alternate points of view had a chance at expression and propagation.

Changing The Tune

Apple licensed OpenGL at the beginning of 1999.  We spent the year integrating the technology and supporting those developers that leapt on board. We meaning hard-working Apple engineers integrated technology. I was on the supporting developers side. Quake III, Unreal Tournament, and their licensees made for a large number of titles.

We looked at performance issues cited by games developers. Hardware engineering took games seriously and used them to look at bottlenecks. Games were a good case for this, using the CPU intensely, input i/o, audio, graphics, and reading files off disk. All at the same time. It was a win-win situation for everyone. Developers had issues addressed (eventually), hardware engineering had something interesting to look at while testing, and customers got a better product than one optimized solely for Photoshop.

Amping presence

In the marketing area, I helped convince Apple events to do the E3 trade show, then designed the presence, from devising what would be talked about at booth stations to hustling up staffers to doing press interviews. It was an interesting dance, as there were two dissonant thoughts. "iMac is awesome and bringing back market share. You'll make money on the Mac." and "Mac OS X will be great. It will fix that no virtual memory problem you need solved. When it comes out. When we don't know." John Carmack's note pretty much nailed the dilemma.

Hitting the high keynote

I worked to get Bungie into the keynote debuting Halo. Another highlight was Douglas Adams kissing me on the cheek for helping change Apple's relationship to games and game developers. The infinite improbability drive is one of my most favorite concepts ever. Highlighting games like Halo and Quake in keynotes made me much happier than showcasing Myst III. The attitude change in just one year was amazing. Great iMac and G3 sales helped. The whole industry was booming from Clinton's Internet initiative and Y2K spending.

Perfect pitch

I also worked on learning the ins and outs of Mac OS X to communicate it to developers. The challenge then was to navigate the path to the next operating system, Mac OS X, while providing developers with a market in which to make money. 1999 wasn’t easy. But the new operating system also provided opportunities. OpenGL became integrated with the graphics system in ways that it couldn’t as an extension. It also presented challenges that needed to be looked at. Games and other high performance software such as audio expected to be able to take total control of the system. UNIX doesn't play that way. So even more concerns had to be addressed, and they were, but these innovations were still a year or two from release.

An internal shakeup moved me from developer relations to markets marketing: consumer marketing. The focus was to create programs that would help developers in the consumer market. There I worked with the web team to create a site focused on games, as well as promoting developers in the online store. The technical challenges presented the previous year were on their way to being solved. Next up, market share.

The Year Of Shifting Gears

The showcasing of Myst III at the January Macworld keynote compelled me to go to Apple to make a contribution. Myst was not a bad concept when it came out in 1993, but it was not a technical innovator in 1998. Perhaps it was the only card available to be played, but you shouldn't try to convince people you have an ace when it's clear you're holding a three: everyone at the company I worked for, which included a lot of gamer magazines, basically just snickered when they heard Myst presented as a cutting-edge game. I volunteered to help change that perception, and was surprised to be given the opportunity. Anyway, the worst that could have happened was to be ignored.

The keynote was just the straw that broke the camel's back. I heard serious gripes about Apple from developers, and the previous summer, even an Apple PR rep ask me the a member of the (albeit fangirl) press, "Do you think we'll even be around in a year? It's really bad. You have no idea." While I worked at a publication that prided itself on gaining audience through enthusiasm instead of controversy, I had little desire to sell myself out under a byline. If I was going to prop up the company, they should pay me for it! If Apple went under, I'd be out of work.

In February, I won Bungie's St. Valentine's Day Myth tournament. I started at Apple in April. Winning a game tournament did give me some street cred, in addition to being the games editor at MacAddict. Being an editor at MacAddict also gave me as good a grounding in the current state of Mac technology as a not-engineer could have.

The problem is the solution

Developers had identified technology and market share as two huge barriers. I tackled technology first, since if you couldn't even create a game, the market share point was moot. Some technical challenges affected the Mac as a whole. Some specifically affected iMac and its successors. The first of these was the lack of legacy ports, only USB. So any game controller that worked on older Macs would not work. Second, iMac was only extendable by USB. There were no card slots to upgrade any of the machine’s capabilities. And it started out with only 2MB of video memory. These are actually benefits (well, except for the graphics memory), but not obvious or easy ones.

A big complaint of customers, and potential PC switchers, was that popular games came out three months to a year or longer after PC release, and if it was a network game, they couldn't play against PC users. Structural problems of the Mac OS presented challenges to porting games in a timely manner, and simultaneous development altogether. The two largest of these issues were virtual memory and byte ordering. Virtual memory allows developers to read all their data in, and store it in more accessible form. This is important in 3D games, which have lots of files used for texturing surfaces. Byte-swapping has to do with how systems read data. Imagine if we both started counting to ten, but I started from ten and went to zero. Intel based systems went one way, Macs the other. Video cards came out for Intel-based systems, and sometimes even software would not make a card usable on a Mac. And even if it did, every time you had to translate back and forth, performance suffered. Even moreso, software written for Intel, unless people were also releasing for another platform, like Playstation, was tilted towards optimizing for one way of reading. Kind of like how left-handed people must feel with doorknobs. You can still open the door, but it's not as easy as for right-handed folks.

Would you spend time pushing a rock up a hill?

Plus, the Mac had several platform-specific technologies that a developer would have to learn in order to release a game. For instance, QuickDraw 3D, while used for professional modeling packages, was not optimized for game performance, and no game developer wanted to learn a complex programming interface on a platform that wasn’t making any money. As an aside, of course people are all over the iPhone developer kit, but that's a market leader. This just goes to show you how market and mind share was also a huge problem. Apple had game technologies ("Sprockets") that it had tried to get developers to adopt, to compete with DirectX, but with failing market share, nobody paid attention. DirectX also was the root of the networking compatibility issues. There were additional minor bus and audio performance problems, but they were at the bottom of the list. Oh, and there was no API for taking over the screen, or changing the look of the mouse cursor. People were very, very deprived. And, mindshare in the game market had moved to set-top boxes that now rivaled the performance of a PC. So Apple had to compete not only against the PC, but also against platforms that had wildly different business models.

So in order to make a (3D) game for Macs, it was basically not physically possible to develop it with the same code base and release simultaneously. There were awesome, dedicated people who did do the work of getting games to Mac, but they had to overcome all the above challenges. Not for the faint of heart. Unless you had come from the Mac to the PC, like Bungie, and had figured out the cross-platform issues, there was no point for a publisher to try to release a cutting edge game simultaneously without major technical changes to the Mac. And even then, Bungie was having problems getting its future games to run on Macs. Well, in any area of life, you can't solve a problem without knowing what it is. By June, I had narrowed the problem to video/graphics, input, sound, memory, bus, networking, and incompatible APIs. And that was before even looking at market and mind share. I'm not sure, actually, what wasn't a problem.

Some things would just have to wait for Mac OS X. It promised virtual memory, for instance. Also, the Sprockets were interesting technology made by devoted Mac engineers, but suffered from being system-add ons created to solve problems not imagined at the beginning of the Mac era fifteen years prior: not only did they make the system more fragile, but developers couldn't count on them being installed. Integrating the solutions Sprockets addressed into the system would make it easier to create games.

Most critical input

But some things couldn't wait, like iMac and USB. It's not like legacy support was a huge issue; hardly anyone was making controllers that worked on the old Mac port, ADB. But the computer would need controllers to be taken seriously in the market. USB was barely gaining traction in the Windows world when iMac was announced. Companies were trying to sell new USB controllers, but PC users wanted the old technology - they didn’t want to upgrade to USB until they had to. USB was a huge win for Apple, as companies did not need to make special equipment to plug into Mac. They did need software though. The game sprockets came to the rescue here. I worked with the input engineer, who quickly hacked together a version that ran on USB before E3. Seriously it was like a month. He was a hero. All the company had to do to make it work on Mac was send us one piece of hardware so the input engineer could write a file that talked to the USB driver. I talked to various controller companies at E3, and they were more than eager to have a major company help promote their products.

This was still a stop-gap add-on solution. We pushed for a better solution in Mac OS X that led to its hardware abstraction layer. This not only solved the problem for game controllers, but also even simple mouse and keyboard device makers. While Apple provided one-button mice with its systems until the release of Mighty Mouse, Mac OS X let you plug in third party mice, and their scroll wheels and right buttons worked. They still had to make software to do more, but at least the mice just worked. This is one instance in which a solution for consumer play gave benefits to everyone. Scroll wheels had not worked under Mac OS 9.

Highest common denominator

The lack of internal upgradability also provided an opportunity. Developers could count on a base level of hardware on the Mac platform. Previous Power Macs had the minimum video power necessary to show QuickTime movies. Everyone was expected to add a video card to play 3D games. Well with such a small market share, few card vendors wrote Mac drivers. So the job was merely to convince product marketing and hardware engineering to add more cost to the machine. The second version of iMac had more video memory. The one after that a much better video chip. Since then all Macs have had adequate if not excellent video chips and memory for games (with the exception of early Intel integrated graphics.) With this base, developers knew what they could count on.

To make this happen, Apple had to lobby graphics vendors to deal with the endian byte-swapping issues and release Mac drivers for their hardware. They wouldn't even come to the table without accompanying 3D software. Likewise, developers who were not already on Mac had no desire to learn a graphics system they couldn't use on PC. Addressing both groups, Apple licensed OpenGL from Silicon Graphics in early 1999, and bought a company that also had extension software for Classic Mac OS. Major developers using OpenGL as their 3D API of choice soon released Mac versions of their games, vindicating that choice.

Why Apple was sucking so hard

A former Apple marketing executive had told the staff at MacAddict in 1997, "Nobody makes money selling software for less than $79." -- essentially slapping us in the face as half our reviews and advertising were game developers. I posit that attitude as why the company was only barely staying alive thanks to pro markets and education, where Apple had a big enough share that people would make software. Apple had lost consumer market share because of lack of software, and frankly the "Performas" didn't. They were seriously underpowered compared to pro Macs. The disregard for consumer made it take quite some doing to get consumer titles in the online store, since they wouldn't make as much money as selling printers or professional software. When I joined, I had thought that I would have a huge problem making things better due to this attitude.

However, I hadn't known about iMac. With it Apple wanted to make a comeback in consumer, making hardware that was actually appealing, using the same processors as in the pro products. (Mostly. iBook took a LONG time to get to G4.) Without executive support for this direction, none of the things I worked on would have happened. Without internal and external developer support, the change would not have occurred. And without people who had abandoned the Mac for really good reasons telling me why, I wouldn't have known where to start. I think everyone at that time had a soft spot for Apple as the inventor popularizer of the personal computer, and didn't want the company to die. Many, many, many game developers got their start on an Apple II. They had no good business reason for giving me the time of day when they did, other than the off-chance that all of the seemingly insurmountable problems would be overcome. Some things in life, I guess, are not just cold, hard numbers.

In 1998, we focused on making sure there were consumer titles for iMac for the holiday season, and that there would be a place to sell them in the online store. To begin to address the mind share issue, we sponsored the fall Game Developer Conference Roadshows and I went on tour touting the Mac. Great times. I think in 1997 the only developers that released A titles for Mac were Blizzard and Bungie. There were a solid selection of titles for holiday 1998 and even more in 1999.