John Couch on Lisa’s software revolution and the perils of market research

On January 26 1983 two executives from Apple, David Larson and John Couch, presented the Apple IIe and the Apple Lisa to the Boston Computer Society.

While Larson’s part was devoted to the newest evolution of the Apple II line, the Apple IIe, for Couch it was the first public presentation of a big project he had worked on for roughly four years. At the time John Couch had the role of Vice President of the Personal Office Systems Division, a “Division” created ad hoc for the Lisa by Apple CEO Michael Scott in 1980, when he reorganized Apple along product lines.

Couch’s speech is available online: it starts at 32:57 and incorporates a short video slideshow. The first part is about the work done with the Lisa and the reasoning behind it. I found it very significant so I’ve done a rough transcription, followed by some notes and commentary to provide a bit more context.

I’d like to share with you a bit of the history of the [Lisa] product […]
I joined Apple in mid-1978 when, for the first time, we were attempting to prove to the world that the personal computer market really existed. That market grew out of hardware technologies, as all of you know.
I tell the story that when I left Grad School in Berkeley (?) in 1972 I bought a home in the Valley there for 27’000 US dollars and a computer of the power of today’s Apple IIe was selling for about 200’000 dollars.
You can’t find a house in the Valley for 200’000 dollars now. [laughter]
It’s a very visual way of seeing what hardware technology has done over the last ten years and we’re going to talk about tonight is the software technology and software technology that has been developed over the last couple of years, in particular taking advantage of some of the evolving hardware technology.

So I joined Apple in ’78 and Steve [Jobs] and I sort of did some blue skying (?) in the last part of 1978, saying “Look, we know that this personal computer market is growing, it’s going to emerge out of the hardware technology, we know that we’re going to have 16 and 32 bit machines, we know that we’re going to have megabytes of memory, two megabytes of memory, you know, what are we going to do in 1980s? Are we going to run the same damn software that we ran on maxis and minis and then on micros? Or are we going to, you know, to really attempt to solve some problems?”

And so we started talking about systems that were easy to use, systems that were integrated. And to kind of help you get into the way of thinking I brought a film tonight. It’s only seven minutes. It’s a sort of video slideshow that we did for the Sales people. We did it for internal reasons. We wanted to be able to communicate to our own internal sales people last october [1982, nda] in Acapulco (?)
[…]

[The video has] Steve mentioning that you can find a sort of common theme throughout Apple and we sort of build products that we ourselves want, as individuals.

I’ve been involved in products in the past that [were] similar to this. […] The first product where I was getting sort of the feeling of history repeating itself, the first product that I was associated with was the HP 35. If you go back by the early 1970s you will remember this 399 USD calculator. The president of HP at the time spent a ton of money going out and doing marketing research whether or not the market was ready for this new technology called the four function (?) calculator and the marketing research group came back and said “Don’t build it because nobody wants it.” And Bill Hewlett said “Hey, I want it and in fact i want it to fit into my pockets, so we’re going ahead with the product.” [laughter] Needles to say I think we all look back at the impact that product had in society in the 1970s, in fact I think the largest slide rule company at the time when the HP 35 was introduced was out of business 18 months later, ‘cause they didn’t see that particular technology coming.

Something similar with the original Apple II [the Apple I, actually, nda] when Steve [Jobs] and Woz wanted to build that. They wanted the product for themselves. If they hadn’t been a garage operation they probably would have gone and commissioned a marketing research group, and I’m convinced that that group would’ve come back in 1976 and said “Don’t build the personal computer because nobody wants it.”
You know, I admit I may even have been one of those people in 1976, “What I’m going to do with a personal computer?”, not really understanding the technology at the time.

This product [the Lisa] exhibits all of the same type of reactions […] a hundred people through different companies with these sneak programs… I, for the last 18 months I’ve been trying to describe something to people without showing to them and that’s been a very difficult process. We would bring these people in, we would talk about the technology and how the personal computer market has grown out of a hardware technology and we would talk about this new market called “Personal Office System”, and their reaction at first would be always be the same: “What is a ‘Personal Office System’ and why do I need a ‘Personal Office System’? And really what is this software technology that you’re talking about?”

The reaction would turn around 180 degrees after they had the opportunity to sit down and use the machine. I think that was best demonstrated last week when Steve and I were in New York for press tours and one of the fellas we were giving a presentation to didn’t really understand what this software technology was and didn’t quite understand what we were talking about until he actually sat down and used the machine and he said “You know, I think I came here thinking I knew everything there was to know about this Lisa system and obviously I knew nothing.” He said “You guys realize what you’ve done?” […] He said “You just built the first manual transmission computer!” and I said “What do you mean?” and he said “Well my grandmother never could drive until manual transmission came. You’ve just built the first computer that my grandmother can use!”

There are some aspects which I think deserve a bit of detail and explanations.

The first thing is the reiterated use of the term “Software technologies”, which was an important concept at Apple at the time. One thing cannot be stressed enough, and that is that the GUI revolution of the Lisa (and then of the Mac) was all about the software. It was a “software thing”, made possible by powerful enough hardware such as the Motorola 68000 and less and less expensive RAM.
Couch speaks about “Personal Office System” because, as I wrote at the beginning, his role at Apple was that of head of the “Personal Office Systems Division”, not of the “Lisa division”.

Another interesting thing is the fruitful relationship between Couch and Jobs.
While Couch speaks a lot about Jobs and the conclusion they came up together, it is important to remember that in 1983 they were in total competition. After being denied the reins of the Lisa, Jobs took possession of the Macintosh project from Jef Raskin and for a while the two teams were opponents. Jobs even bet (and lost) 5000 USD with Couch that the Mac would beat the Lisa to the market.
And yet, regardless of any competition or animosity at the time, it is evident that during the early years they came up with and shared a lot of important ideas and opinions.

One very important opinion that both Jobs and Couch definitely held is that sometimes market research isn’t helpful at all. In fact, when there’s a new game-changing product, market research should be ignored, and Jobs demonstrated this again and again in the following decades of Apple products.

In 1987 Apple engineer (and Macintosh II cocreator) Mike Dhuey stated that “Steve Jobs thought that he was right and didn’t care what the market wanted.”

More than twenty years later former Apple retail head Ron Johnson recalled how Steve Jobs’ “ability to incisively critique a creative endeavor was second to none” and most importantly that “[…] his intuition, his understanding of what customers would respond to was unparalleled. It was a gift for me to work with him because you’re always in business when you’re inventing things you’ve got to balance the dream with the data. [For] most people the data overtakes the decision making and then you don’t have a dream. Steve always stayed focused on the prize.”

Note: the first picture is a still capture of the video recording of the Boston event, while the second, showing Couch with Jobs and Paul Dali, co-divisional manager of Apple’s Apple // and Apple /// product lines, is taken from the allaboutstevejobs.com website. Both images are dated 1983.
Thanks to David Fradin for identifying Paul Dali.