Fire in the Valley, 3rd Edition

The Big Turnaround

When Steve came back to Apple, he told me that Microsoft had won the PC battle and that was irreversible, over and done with. But he thought that if he could get Apple healthy enough to persist until the next major tech dislocation, Apple could win at that.

–Andy Hertzfeld

Apple was a company in dire trouble, struggling very publicly for survival. Its already small market share was eroding, developers were building applications for Macs second if at all, the stock was dropping, and nobody seemed to have a plan for changing any of that. In 1996 Business Week headlined Apple’s troubles as “The Fall of an American Icon.”

But Apple wasn’t simply short of cash. It was in an existential struggle to rediscover its identity ...