The 1980s were not kind to America. Sitting at the end of the longest period of economic expansion in history, what have we gained? Budget deficits are bigger. Trade deficits are bigger. What property we haven’t sold we’ve mortgaged. Our basic industries are being moved overseas at an alarming rate. We pretended for a time that junk bond traders and corporate disassemblers create wealth, but they don’t. America is turning into a service economy and telling itself that’s good. But it isn’t.

America was built on the concept of the frontier. We carved a nation out of the wilderness, using as tools enthusiasm, adolescent energy, and an unwillingness to recognize limitations. But we are running out of recognized frontiers. We are getting older and stodgier and losing our historic advantage in the process. In contrast, the PC business is its own frontier, created inside the box by inward-looking nerds who could find no acceptable challenge in the adult world. Like any other true pioneers, they don’t care about what is possible or not possible; they are dissatisfied with the present and excited about the future. They are antiestablishment and rightly see this as a prerequisite for success.

While Noyce’s ideas about technical management sound all too enlightened to be part of anything called big business, they worked well at Fairchild and then at Noyce’s next creation, Intel. Intel was started, in fact, because Noyce couldn’t get Fairchild’s eastern owners to accept the idea that stock options should be a part of compensation for all employees, not just for management. He wanted to tie everyone, from janitors to bosses, into the overall success of the company, and spreading the wealth around seemed the way to go.

This management style still sets the standard for every computer, software, and semiconductor company in the Valley today, where office doors are a rarity and secretaries hold shares in their company’s stock. Some companies follow the model well, and some do it poorly, but every CEO still wants to think that the place is being run the way Bob Noyce would have run it.

IBM people are a little smug, a little slow, and slightly overweight. Most IBMers are hired straight out of school and have never worked for another company. They are folks who drive Buick Regals and take them to the car wash every Saturday morning, paying extra to get the hot wax. Their contented mid—dle-class style bugs the hell out of Silicon Valley entrepreneur types, who want to do business with IBM and yet can’t understand that there are folks in the world—even in the world of computers—who aren’t, like them, madly driven to have a fortune and a Ferrari before their midlife crisis.

The whole marketing operation at Apple is now run by former salespeople, a dangerous trend. Marketing is the creation of long-term demand, while sales is execution of marketing strategies. Marketing is buying the land, choosing what crop to grow, planting the crop, fertilizing it, and then deciding when to harvest. Sales is harvesting the crop. Salespeople in general don’t think strategically about the business, and it’s this short-term focus that’s prevalent right now at Apple.

This habit of sitting on a big pile of money originated at Hewlett-Packard in the 1940s. David Packard figured that careful management of inventories and cash flow could generate lots of money over time. Hanging on to that money meant that the next emergency or major expansion could be financed entirely from internal funds. Now every company in Silicon Valley manages its finances the H-P way.

OS/2 1.0 was designed to run on the 80286 processor. Bill Gates urged IBM to go straight for the 80386 processor as the target for OS/2, but IBM was afraid that the 386 would offer performance too close to that of its minicomputers. Why buy an AS/400 minicomputer for $200,000, when half a dozen networked PS/2 Model 80s running OS/2-386 could give twice the performance for one, third the price? The only reason IBM even developed the 386-based Model 80, in fact, was that Compaq was already selling thousands of its DeskPro 386s. Over the objections of Microsoft, then, OS/2 was aimed at the 286, a chip that Gates correctly called “brain damaged.”