The Apple University Consortium - Striking Gold!

In 1982 while most of us were thinking about how the Mac could succeed in the business market, Joanna Hoffman was thinking hard about the education marketplace. Could the Mac have a role in education and garner significant market share? The Apple II was already a mainstay in the K-12 market, and we didn’t want to cannibalize that revenue. What about the college and university market?

Keep in mind, in 1984 there were no personal computers on college campuses. If you were a science or engineering major, you had an HP or Texas Instruments powerful handheld calculator. But that’s as fancy as it got.

Joanna hired a consultant – her name might have been Carolyn – to do a broad readiness survey of the college and university market in America. We gleaned from the research that a number of universities were getting ready to deploy large numbers of personal computers. Yet no one had a clear idea of what this meant. And no one was willing to be the first into the pool.

Additionally I remembered reading someplace else that universities often organized collaborative efforts into “consortiums”. This was a good word…and we would use it.

An idea was hatched: The Apple University Consortium (AUC). It would be highly exclusive – thus appealing to the egos of elite universities. It would be prestigious. Steve would speak at an annual gathering. And it would require massive deployments of Macs during 1984, thus supplementing our sales to large businesses, which we expected to be much weaker than what our press releases were promising.

To join the AUC, a university had to commit to purchasing and deploying 2,000 Macs over a three-year period. We would charge $1,000 per Mac (the retail price as $2,495). The university could give these away to their students, or they could sell them as a new mandatory requirement as a part of admissions. The contract also required soft commitments tied to encouraging faculty engagement in curricula development. In the fine print we stated clearly that there would be no penalty for not meeting the dollar and volume commitment.

Now we only needed one additional ingredient: A great person to turn this idea into reality.

Dan’l Lewin had come to Apple a couple years earlier. At that time he was working in the Lisa group. He had an excellent prior sales background at Sony and he was tall, handsome and straight out of central casting. He was our guy, and we were excited to hire him. 

The initial goal given to Dan’l (yes, that’s his real name) was to sign up 12 universities, all under tight non-disclosure agreements, before the launch of the Mac. When an earlier launch date in 1983 slipped to January 24, 1984, Dan’l doubled the goal to 24.

Selling the AUC was a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Who would bite first? Dan’l tantalized MIT by telling them that Stanford was considering it. And vice-versa. It was a delicate dance, but Dan'l knew all the steps. The ego and pride at these elite institutions played right into our hands. Dan’l was exceptionally successful. And he did it almost all by himself. 

Prior to the launch, he signed up the following list of universities, each committing to 2,000 Macs:

The entire Ivy League – Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Penn, Cornell, and Dartmouth

Plus:

Boston College
Brigham Young University
City University of New York
Carnegie Mellon University 
Drexel University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Northwestern University
Reed College
Stanford University
University of Chicago
University of Illinois
University of Michigan
University of Texas
University of Utah
University of Washington
University of Wisconsin
And one more … was it Mills College?

Dan’l hit a home run. Wait, he hit 24 home runs. In fact, he should be in the Hall of Fame.

Some universities joined because they didn’t want their elite peers to move ahead of them in the ephemeral status rankings. Some schools joined because they wanted to appear to be part of the elite universities. And some joined because they had a clear vision that computers would be on all desktops and they wanted to be at the fron of this parade. One such school was Drexel University in Philadelphia.

Drexel surprised everyone by being the first university to sign up for the Apple University Consortium. Most of us had never heard of Drexel until they raised their hand. But they were the first college in America to require all incoming freshmen to purchase and use a Mac. This effort was led by then Drexel president William W. Hagerty, who was serving his 21st and final term as university president. What an amazing and courageous thing to do on your way to retirement! And the image of Drexel changed in a flash. 

Soon after the AUC was announced in early 1984, many other colleges and universities began calling us, wanting to buy computers in large quantities. They didn't want to be left behind. And Dan’l added more people to his team. We didn’t expand the number of members in the AUC, but we immediately created additional college marketing and sales programs. 

Eventually this became a huge revenue stream for Apple and greatly helped the success of the Mac.

And now, 33 years later, many of those former students are avid middle-aged users of all things Apple – mobile devices, tablets and laptops. The AUC successfully seeded the first generation of users, and now their children are following in the branded footsteps of their parents.

When you think of David vs. Goliath, please add Dan’l vs. IBM to the story. In my estimation, his results were Biblical!