Apple's had several near-death experiences. As author, investor and now Google advisor Guy Kawasaki puts it, the company must have a guardian angel. And in the mid-1980s, that guardian angel was Aldus PageMaker. “In the 1980s, we thought we had Macintosh all figured out,” says Kawasaki, who worked on Steve Jobs’ stealth Macintosh task force from 1983 to 1987. “We thought it would be a spreadsheet, database, and word processing machine. We were zero for three. The one bright spot in the entire Macintosh software universe was desktop publishing. Aldus PageMaker invented desktop publishing, and it saved the company.”
Few people know this story, not since the post-iPod era dawned. But it’s a prime example of what Kawasaki has coined the “art of enchantment.” Aldus PageMaker had the ability to enchant customers, so much so that it resuscitated a whole other company — a company that has gone on to make customer enchantment core to...
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