“I started doing this because none of the sales associates could ever answer any questions about Apple products and I could,” said WilliamLH (http://www.mymac2u.com/), one of the guys in aisle six. “Why did I do this, with no pay, no outright reward? Because that is the type of people Mac users are. It is a passion, an obsession, a religion if you will.” WilliamLH started visiting stores when he was out anyway, he said, but eventually he went every weekend when he had free time.
Occasionally, extra-zealous Mac fans would sabotage Windows PCs at stores, though it was more common to rearrange a magazine stand so that Mac magazines obscured the Windows ones.
The army of volunteer salespeople worked so well, Apple eventually co-opted the idea, first with “Demo Days”—one-off sales events coinciding with big shopping days or product launches—and then with a longer-term program overseen by MarketSource, a marketing firm.
Dan Oblak (http://macbigot.com/) became a Demo Day “volunteer”—paid $75 a day—and then an Apple Power Rep, which was more of a part-time job. As a Power Rep, Oblak spent about 10 hours a week, on top of his day job, supporting the staff at five local Circuit City stores. “These are usually not people who spend every waking hour reading about and discussing the Mac,” he said. “But I do; and the exposure I’ve had to the questions and concerns of the potential Mac customer is a tool that these stores can take advantage of.”
Oblak was responsible for making sure all the Macs were running, the display area was neat and tidy, and all the signage was present and correct. On top of this, he put together a weekly Mac newsletter (http://homepage.mac.com/jdoblak/) for the sales staff and often made himself available throughout the week for advice. He didn’t do any selling directly, although he often talked to potential customers.
“My wife is a Mac widow,” he said. “It’s a challenge. Many of these salespeople are a bit green, and there is high turnover in any retail environment, but little victories here and there make it all worthwhile."
SOME OF THE GUYS IN AISLE SIX
A lot of men get dragged to the mall on weekends to go shopping with their wives. But for Eddie Clipper, the opposite was true. He’d drag his wife to the mall, but not to go shopping—to voluntarily help sell Macs. Many weekends Clipper would go to the mall or a local computer superstore to fix up the Macs on display and persuade customers to buy them. “My wife knows that if we stop in the computer department, I will be talking to people for a while,” he said. ”She usually goes elsewhere in the store and drags me away later.”
K. Jerry Smith was the same. Every month or so, he’d take his son to a local Sears or Circuit City, and they’d spend the day fixing up the Macs. “My son and I, like so many other Macheads, have always cleaned up the Macs on display at stores that could care less whether they were properly displayed—usually major retailers,” he said. “To this day, one can almost always find Macs with frozen systems after the kids of busy shoppers have banged on the keyboards. We restart and repair whatever damage has been done. We want them to look and operate at their best.”
Jeff Sepeta is another who acted as a voluntary salesperson. “Although you’re not supposed to solicit business inside CompUSA, I have often caught sales reps saying bad things about the Mac to people who are clearly interested in buying one,” he said. “I generally step in, explain why the Mac is better than the sales rep would admit, and generally make the sales guy look like cow pie.”
Clipper, Smith, and Sepeta, and dozens of others like them, perhaps hundreds, were doing their bit to help Apple in its darkest days. In the late 1990s, Apple’s showing at retail stores was below par: indifferent staff at computer stores often relegated Macs to the quietest aisle. Machines were left turned off or were badly neglected, and stocks of Mac software were often out.
Without the resources to tackle every store, Apple’s chief evangelist, Guy Kawasaki, urged Mac fans to rectify the miasma through his popular Mac EvangeList mailing list. Kawasaki suggested subscribers tidy up displays, buttonhole salespeople, and counter pro-Windows sales patter. It worked pretty well. For a while, many of the thousands of stores selling Macs were visited by well-intentioned Mac enthusiasts. Collectively, the volunteers came to be known as “the guy in aisle six.”
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.”
James Coates, a technology columnist with the Chicago Tribune, received more than 500 emails after writing a story about Apple that was posted to the EvangeList. He likened the two-week flood of abusive email to a “cyberlynching,” an “online necktie party” at the hands of “virtual vigilantes.” “The [emails] included unkind words about the moral character of my poor late mother, suggestions that I perform mechanically impossible actions with my new IBM ThinkPad laptop computer, and sadly, a few death threats,” he wrote. “‘Come to Texas,’ wrote one. ‘We haven’t shot a tourist in a car since 1963.’”
Henry Norr, a former editor at MacWeek, said he would get scores of “nasty, hostile” email if he wrote anything critical about the Mac. Some were polite and thoughtful, he said, but in general the experience was like being “besieged by zombies,” some of whom were “really unbalanced.”
In his defense, Kawasaki frequently urged subscribers to be on their best behavior. He forbade sabotaging Windows machines and told EvangeListas to be nice and polite. As well as pointing out negative press, Kawasaki suggested readers send love notes to journalists who wrote nice things about Apple.
Kawasaki left Apple in 1998 to start Garage.com (now Garage Technology Ventures), a “boot camp” for entrepreneurs. He folded the list in April 1999. The final posting, signed by Kawasaki (“who is and shall remain pure Macintosh”), cited Apple’s “stunning turnaround” as the main reason for discontinuing the list. “The original purpose of EvangeList was to counteract the negative news about Apple and Macintosh, and I believe that EvangeList has served its purpose—fantastically,” Kawasaki wrote. “So, after discussing what we should do with EvangeList with the folks at Apple, we’ve decided to retire the list.”
Oddly, it was mourned by some of its “victims.” Dan Gillmor, a columnist with the San Jose Mercury News, who had been a faithful reader for many years, was sad to see EvangeList pass. “Hearing from people who want to change your mind is really useful in the business of journalism,” Gillmor said. “I learn more from people who disagree with me than I do from those who agree. But after hearing from several hundred, you do get weary.”
James Coates, the Chicago Tribune columnist, had mixed feelings about the list’s passing. “I did suffer the brunt of an awful lot of abuse from Guy Kawasaki and the EvangeLists, and I am even bitter about it in some ways,” he said. “But I learned a tremendous amount of things Macintosh there. I also made a lot of friends and things like that, so I mourn its passing.”
The “education” of journalists had a mixed effect. The negative stories didn’t stop altogether, but a lot of journalists were more careful when reporting news about Apple. “This writer will never again write about an Apple-related story without a keen gun-shy appreciation that critical hordes are judging every word,” Coates wrote after getting flamed.
THE EVANGELIST
In the mid- to late 1990s, Apple might have gone out of business if it hadn’t been for a crusading army of evangelists led by a charismatic marketing executive. The executive—Guy Kawasaki—was an early proponent of what has come to be known as “evangelist marketing”—turning your customers into messianic proponents. Kawasaki’s primary tool was a popular Internet mailing list called the Mac EvangeList. It not only had a profound influence on Mac culture, it arguably saved Apple.
In the mid-1990s, Apple was the biggest computer maker in the U.S., but increasing competition from Microsoft, as well as a series of botched products and business blunders, led to a long string of heavy losses. Apple appeared to be in a “death spiral,” from which it couldn’t pull out. It’s hard to kill a company as big as Apple, but in 1996 and 1997, it looked doomed.
A big part of the problem was negative press. Bad news about Apple became a self-fulfilling prophecy: stories about Apple’s decline made customers nervous. They bought fewer computers, and the trouble deepened. Realizing this, Kawasaki launched the EvangeList in July 1996 to provide a daily stream of “good news” about Apple. “The whole reason that EvangeList was started was because the press was so negative,” said Kawasaki recently. “I decided that instead of trying to convince the press, we would become the press.”
The EvangeList, sent out daily, was a breezy mix of news, tips, queries, and job postings. Thanks to Kawasaki’s sharp wit, and often hilarious diatribes against Microsoft, the EvangeList quickly became popular. At its peak, the EvangeList boasted 44,000 daily subscribers, although Kawasaki has suggested the list actually reached about 300,000 Macintosh fans, because it was so widely passed around in email, newsgroups, bulletin boards, and Web sites. Kawasaki eventually archived the list on an affiliated “Macway” Web site, which is now gone.
As well as news, the EvangeList had a big activist component. Kawasaki urged subscribers—known as EvangeListas—to proselytize the Mac by engaging Windows PC users in debate. EvangeListas were urged to wear Apple-logoed T-shirts and baseball caps “to show the world we’re not crawling into holes and dying.” He recommended leaving Macintosh magazines in doctors’ waiting rooms and seat pockets on airplanes. And he suggested asking store clerks why they weren’t stocking more Macs, fixing up neglected machines, and talking to potential customers about buying a Mac. Many subscribers spent their weekends as unpaid salespeople at CompUSA, steering customers to the Mac section.
But the list was most famous for marshalling a formidable force of Mac fanatics when it appeared that the platform needed defending in the press. Kawasaki urged subscribers to “educate” wrongheaded journalists who wrote negative stories about Apple; and he often provided the appropriate email address. “Write a letter to the publications that publish stupid, insipid, inaccurate, and unfair stories,” he wrote. “Most journalists are insecure and perceptive: after the 300th flaming message, they’ll get the picture.” Kawasaki’s 300 flames was conservative: some journalists got hundreds—sometimes thousands—of angry, abusive emails. This was in the early days of the Net, before spam, when most reporters got a handful of messages a week and dutifully responded to each one.