3ones

After leaving Ardent (a supercomputer company Ill blog about later) in 1988, I consulted for Pixar when they were still in San Rafael and were a hardware company trying to make software and commercials. While I was consulting for them, I got a call from a recruiter for a company called SuperMac, which made add-on products for the Macintosh.  They were one of the first companies to sell an external disk drive for the original Mac; they had the first “color paint programs” for the Mac; and when the Mac was ju...

A week before I started I got inkling of really how deep I was in.  While I was waiting in the lobby to pick up my offer letter, the head of marketing communications (who was to be one of my direct reports) came up to me as I held my just signed employment agreement.  She said, “Oh I’m glad you’re coming, and I wanted to grab you before you started because we need to resolve the company’s biggest marketing problem.”  I was impressed; this was something so important that she couldn’t wait for my first day.  ...

After my first month I knew a lot, I knew more about our customers than anyone in the company.  In this one month I had learned more about desktop publishing on the Mac than any one of our competitors.  Now the question was what to do with it.  First I need to make sure what I really learned was information I could base a company strategy on. 

My first question was, did the total number of customers that had already bought products from our competitors and us represent a saturated market or the tip of the i...