Good Apples with bad reputations

The venerable Apple ///

You've probably heard of the Apple II, the IBM PC and, perhaps even the Radio Shack TRS-80. But have you ever heard of the Apple III?

The Apple III (known by those of us who owned and loved it as the "Apple ///") was Apple's first attempt at building a business computer. It was introduced in 1981. You can see a picture of the Apple /// on the right side of this column.

For its time, the Apple /// was a pretty good machine. It had a flexible and sophisticated operating system that was called SOS. (Interestingly, SOS stood for "Sophisticated Operating System.") It could even emulate the Apple II with incredible accuracy. That meant that the Apple /// could just as easily be a gaming machine as it could be a business machine. This represented real versatility in the early 1980s.

If the Apple /// was such a good machine, how come you've probably never heard of it? In fact, the computer is so unknown today that if you type in “Apple III”, the Google search engine will ask, “Did you mean: Apple II?” That’s how much of a non-entity the Apple /// has become. It is almost as if it had never existed.

Apple had hit a home run with the Apple II series. They thought that by offering a more powerful computer aimed at businesses, they could enjoy the same success in the business field with the Apple /// as they did with the Apple II in the home market. But three things went wrong.

• First, Apple didn't market the machine to business users particularly well. Many businesses were oblivious to Apple's entry into the business market focusing instead on Radio Shack computers and the IBM PC.

• Secondly, IBM, already a major player in business computing (perhaps the major player at the time,) introduced the IBM PC. They did this  right on the heals of the Apple ///. The Apple /// was announced in May 1980. In August 1981 IBM announced the IBM PC. Guess which product received the best reception among business users?

• Third, and most seriously, there was a nasty hardware glitch with the Apple ///. This glitch caused the chips to work free out of their sockets on the motherboard. The result was a catastrophic system failure. Apple fixed the problem, but the damage was done. The Apple /// had gained a reputation for being troublesome and unreliable. That kind of reputation is deadly for a machine that is intended to help run businesses.

The Apple /// was discontinued early in 1984, just three years after it was introduced and a scant three months after another Apple product, the Macintosh, was released.

So why do I bring up a computer that died a quick and untimely death 25 years ago? To point out that the same business adages that were true in 1981 still hold true in 2009.

In business reputation is everything. If your company or your products enjoy a good reputation, you have some latitude for an occasional slip. However, if your company or product is tagged with a poor reputation, you have a very difficult hole to pull yourself out of. Apple reportedly lost over $60 million on the Apple ///, but they survived largely on their reputation for the Apple II product line and by the amazing acceptance of the Macintosh line. (Apple had yet another failure with their successor business machine and Macintosh predecessor, the Lisa. See a pattern here?)

The lessons learned from the Apple /// are very much applicable to businesses today and worth keeping in mind.