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Newton, short story of Apple’s biggest bankruptcy

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May 29, 1992 entered the history of technology as the day of the Apple’s biggest failure. But since innovation also proceeds through failures, from what you learn when you are wrong, this is a story of innovation. Of bad innovation. We are talking about Apple but not that of Steve Jobs: these are the years in which the co-founder was sacked by John Sculley, the manager whom he himself had convinced to leave Pepsi Cola with the famous phrase “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water or do you want to change the world?“. As we know, John Sculley accepted but in 1985 he killed Steve Jobs because he considered his vision of personal computers “lunatic”.

Sculley’s idea was that hi-tech could not be sold as a consumer product. And in fact the product for which it went down in history was aimed at a clientele of professionals and businessmen. His name was Newton, and he was a PDA (a term coined by Sculley, personal digital assistant), that is, a computer that was in the palm of one hand and controlled with a stylus: a tablet, practically. On the day of the presentation, on May 29, 1992, in Chicago, it was shown that you could order a pizza by moving the icons of the ingredients, or mark an appointment with someone by simply writing it by hand on the screen: Newton had to be able to recognize the handwriting. and also the voice.

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The presentation did not go smoothly: the first Newton brought to the stage did not turn on because the batteries were dead. But the reception was very good: the New York Times said it was another Apple magic (which hadn’t come out with a hit product since the 1984 Mac). In reality, the Newton took over a year to hit the shelves (August 2, 1993) and in the end it performed much less well than expected. Sculley insisted, seven improved versions were produced by allying with Sharp and Motorola, but of modest success. And when Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1998, one of the first things he did was cancel the Newton project. Recently the weekly Time argued that it should be reevaluated: there were good insights into it, things that we would see perfectly done by Apple many years later. In the end, a successful innovation is not just a good idea, but a perfect execution at the right time.

We are building an Italian Innovation Almanac. If you have a fact with a date to propose write to me at [email protected]

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