On the other hand, some journalists complained that the fanaticism was harming Apple. “Overreliance on fanatic faithfulness led to years of complacency at Apple, the business,” wrote Charles Pillar in the Los Angeles Times in 1997, when Apple was in deep trouble. “And it’s not working now—just look at Mac sales figures.”
Whatever the effect on the media, there’s the widely held perception that the EvangeListas saved Apple’s bottom line—it has been argued that millions of little acts of Mac evangelism stopped the company from sliding into bankruptcy. During the EvangeList years, there was a lot of committed and energetic lobbying for the Mac in schools, universities, and businesses threatening to dump them. Who knows how many would have abandoned the platform if a committed friend, relative, or workmate hadn’t convinced them not to? “Thanks to the Macintosh loyalists, [and] people like Guy Kawasaki who are out championing the cause for the underdog, Apple, you know, still is a contender,” Jim Carlton, author of Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders [out of print], told National Public Radio.
However, there were a number of high-profile institutional switches to Windows PCs at big Macintosh sites, Dartmouth College being the best known, that mobilized scores of EvangeListas to no effect. “I don’t think it helped a lot,” Cheryl England, a former editor of MacAddict, said of the EvangeList. “It’s obvious to say Apple’s loyal customers saved the company; of course they did, it wasn’t saved by its disloyal customers. But it’s hard to judge how much of an effect the EvangeList had, rather than Mac users generally. The return of Steve Jobs to the company in 1998 and popular products like the iMac probably had more to do with it.”
While the EvangeListas tried to help Apple in retail stores, Apple eventually dumped a lot of the chain stores in favor of a “store within a store” at CompUSA. The company also started concentrating on specialist Apple retailers and its own Web site.
The most profound effect of the EvangeList was to energize the Mac community in its darkest days. The EvangeList unified Mac users and gave them an identity. Its championing spirit of evangelism survives today, and, in fact, has never been stronger. People are as passionate as ever about Macs and are just as committed to cheerleading them.
“The one good thing it did is provide an early platform for people who love the Mac,” said England. “It was a club. It was their friend. It was a place they could go and not get picked on by [Microsoft] PC suits.”