Computers: Just another commodity?
Published: 03 Oct 2003 10:54 BST
Why have you decided to harvest some of your investments at this time?
I think that the opportunity for young companies has shifted from IPOs to M&A. This is actually a very good time to be a seller or buyer of surviving companies that have made it through the last three or four years. I think that the opportunity for young companies has shifted from IPOs to M&A.
I think the M&A activity will only increase. I have been involved in a couple of businesses that have been able to do M&As this year, but I suspect the amount of M&A activity will only increase in the next several years, where I don't see much opening up in the IPO market, except on a very selective basis for probably several more years.
When you watch the technology field, are there any times when you say to yourself that they really got it wrong in this area, or they are hitting it on the nose?
I think the computer industry now is almost like the fax industry or printer industry, in that it has been totally commoditised. The only exception to that is what Apple has been able to do with just beautiful products, well-thought through, no compromises, great styling. And that, at least, so far has not turned into a mainstream industry. It's much more of a selective market industry. Taking an automobile analogy, it's more like a BMW selling inside of a much larger mainstream automobile industry.
Any missed opportunities that you wish you could do over?
As I look back on things that I wished we would have done differently when I was at Apple, I think one of the biggest missed opportunities, and it was on my watch, so I feel responsible and disappointed that we didn't do more with it, was Hypercard. It was created back in 1987 by Bill Atkinson, Apple's first software programmer. We could never figure out exactly what it was. We thought it was a prototyping tool. We thought it was a database tool. It was actually used by people as a front-end communications device for TCP/IP to connect the Internet to large Cray computers.
We weren't insightful enough to recognise that what we had inside of Hypercard, essentially, was everything that later was developed so successfully by Tim Berners-Lee with HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). We didn't call it that. But essentially, we had all that hypertext, radio buttons and linking capability architected in the original Hypercard. In hindsight, I wish Apple had recognised that we had a huge opportunity to go take our user interface culture, and our know-how, and applied it to the Internet. I think we would have had a very different story for Apple during the 1990s. But that, of course, is hindsight.
Do you see other similar cases of missed opportunities at other companies?
I just don't have the view into the research labs at what a lot of companies are working on, so I don't know if I can add a lot of perspective to that. I can look back at something like Newton and feel that it could have had a very different future than what had turned out. Newton could have been one of Apple's most profitable investments ever. Most people are aware Apple spent over $100m developing Newton, but Newton was a chance for Apple to start with a clean sheet of paper and to be able to license both the chip design, as well as the software. We had a number of partners who had already signed up with it. The software didn't live up to the early ambitions that we had and the handwriting ended up being a pretty big embarrassment because it just didn't work.
But the hardware inside of Newton, which was the ARM processor, has gone on to be incredibly successful, and it actually enabled Apple to make this huge amount of money out of the original Newton investment. But it's so easy to look backward on things and see decisions that could have been done differently. It's obviously a lot harder to look forward.
Do you ever see yourself stepping back into the role as a CEO of a large corporation, or at a start-up?
I think it's pretty unlikely I would go back to being a CEO, or step into a corporate environment, other than as a board member. My interest now is really more in coaching CEOs and management teams and also enjoying life a lot more. I take time off for a lot of travel. I spent several months this year travelling throughout Asia and, really, Australasia. I intend to do more travelling in the coming year. I'm really much more balanced in my life now. Probably, you could call it semiretired. I like working on a project basis, as opposed to actually being involved in directly running something myself.
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