
authorized an amazing televison commercial based on the George Orwell book “1984”.
If you haven’t see it recently, take a look: 1984 Macintosh TV Commercial
It was directed by Ridley Scott fresh from filming the science fiction story, “Blade Runner”.
At this time Jobs is in competition with IBM’s PC and he
knows he is loosing the numbers game.
The ad paints IBM as the big monolith who is sucking our
brains and turning us into robots. Theywant total control.
The reality I have learned after reading the Steve Jobs
biography is that he is the total control freak.
He made the engineers building the Macintosh design new
screws so no one from the outside could get “under the hood” and change anything inside. At this time lots of computer users were still hobbyists who loved to open the box to see how it works and personalize it.
Businesses needed to have an open architecture so they could add more memory or application programs.
By making the Macintosh so closed Jobs limited the sales. It was the computer he created…but not the computer all his customers might have wanted.
A great commercial, a doomed computer.
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