Triumph of the Nerds: Great Artists Steal

By 1980, Apple was already the biggest Personal Computer (PC) producing company in the world. Then IBM came up with its own version of the PC to challenged Apple. Nevertheless, PC usage was still not convenient enough, and the race to make the PC more user-friendly began…
The journey to make PC more user-friendly began at the Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC), where under funding by Xerox, engineers had developed the precursor to the modern, user-friendly PC, which is the Graphic User Interface (GUI). But sadly Xerox did not appreciate the benefits of the GUI, and Steve Jobs soon snatched the opportunity by copying the idea and further developing it into the Apple PC. The IBM PC was hurting Apple’s sales, and this was due to the software in the IBM PC. Steve Jobs then recruited Microsoft to write the applications for the new Apple PC. Initially, Apple tried to produce LISA, a PC utilizing GUI, but there was a problem. LISA didn’t work properly, and it had an extremely high price tag, which in the end turned the LISA into a flop. Then came the Macintosh, Apple’s second effort to introduce the user-friendly PC, and it proved to be a hit.
Although the Macintosh, or “Mac” was “insanely great” and despite the hype due to intense advertising, the sales of the Mac were disastrous. The applications in the Mac was still scarce, having only the “Mac Paint” and “Mac Write”, as compared to the IBM PC, which on the other hand, contained applications that people could really use, such as the spreadsheet etc. Another problem is the dot-matrix printer. GUI just couldn’t “express” its fullest potential due to limitation in printing. Then, developments were done on the printer by Adobe which introduced laser-printing, bringing salvation to the Mac, creating a whole new business― word processing.
Nevertheless, Mac sales were still flat, and Steve Jobs left Apple after a sharp contention arose between him and John Scully. The years after Steve Jobs were the most profitable for Apple. Sales rose to millions a year. In the background, Microsoft was plotting to unleash its own version of the GUI, as it saw the Mac as a competitor to the MS-DOS. Out came Windows…
Apple sued Microsoft as it felt that it was copying the Mac, but sadly it lost. Then came Windows 95, which sealed the fate of Apple, pushing it into a niche in the PC industry. Although Microsoft was a success, Bill Gates wasn’t resting on his laurels. He invested in the animation company, Dreamworks and many other ventures. But competitors were starting to rear their heads, one of them being Larry Ellison, who believed the PC will be replaced by an “information device”.
The future is the internet. Everyone knows it. And Bill Gates, Larry Ellison agrees on that.