Alongside the return of Steve Jobs, Apple's first online store played a crucial role in the company's survival and resurgence. It officially opened for business on November 10, 1997 and has been online ever since — except when Apple takes it offline to promote the launch of new products. It wasn't enough that Steve Jobs came back to Apple and stripped its messy range down to a few core products.
The iMac wasn't enough to turn the company around either — not by itself. While it may not have seemed it at the time, the launch of the online Apple Store on November 10, 1997 turned out to be a crucial component of the company's survival. There's an argument that it was born of irritation rather than anyone seeing how useful it would be.
But while there is truth in that, the full story is that Apple badly needed its own online store. Back in the 1990s, there were no bricks-and-mortar Apple Stores. You had to buy Macs through specialist dealers or through big chain stores.
The chains famously employed whatever the opposite of Geniuses is, and they all pushed whichever box they got the most commission on. Given that Apple was rarely, if ever, the most profitable sale for someone in a store, what Macs were there tended to be ignored. And you don't run a retail store by taking up space with inventory that isn't selling, so Apple was being stocked by fewer places.
Shortly before the launch of its own online store, Apple announced a deal with Comp USA to create what it called a store-within-a-store. It meant a higher profile for Apple than before, but it was still under someone else's control. Those are washing machines behind them.
All that the salesman cared about was a $50 spiff, Steve Jobs later told Walter Isaacson. Unless we could find ways to get our message to customers at the store, we were screwed. Whereas apple.com/store was owned and run by no one but Apple itself.
There were few online stores for computers in the late 1990s, but what there was proved to drive Apple down this road through a combination of irritation and insight. Dell There was really only one significant online store for computers at the time, and that was Dell's. The company didn't design computers in the sense that Apple did, it really just packaged them, but at the time, it packaged them extremely successfully. Dell had also circumvented the need for resellers and chain stores, by chiefly selling over the phone.
Not only did it cut out the need and the cost of these other companies, it meant Dell could ask customers what they wanted and then give it to them. Just as Apple was starting to do...
Source: AppleInsider · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing