In business, as in journalism, love and I suppose everything else in life, timing is often everything.

One of the best - if sadder - examples of that harsh fact is that of the late Gary Kildall, founder of Digital Research.

As the story's told, when IBM felt forced by an upstart named Apple's success with a "personal" computer to reply with a PC of its own, it sent a team of "suits" to contract with someone to write an operating system for the new machine. Kildall, the creator of the CP/M operating system, was deemed the obvious choice.

But when the IBM team showed up at his company - contract in hand - Kildall, as luck had it, was out of town. So they spoke with someone else at the firm - someone, it is said, who was so difficult to negotiate with, that the IBM team walked out, frustrated ... and empty-handed.

They took their business elsewhere; ultimately negotiating with an unknown computer geek named Bill Gates to code a new CP/M-like OS for them, in Kildall's place.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Kildall tried hard to manufacture a "second chance" for himself and his company - attempting to fashion and market a better DOS than Microsoft's - devoting the remainder of his life and career to it.

But successful "comebacks" are rare, if not unheard of, commodities in the PC industry.

Kildall eventually did come up with a better and less expensive product, but it failed to gain market acceptance not withstanding those advantages. It was too late.

IT consumers as a group are, in reality, quite conservative and rarely inclined to "think different". They seek the safety of standards. And standards, once set, create a market momentum that is extremely difficult to over-turn.

At some point, economic success and failure becomes largely a matter of self-fulfilling prophecy. Perception becomes everything and "second chances" - in the computer industry at least - are exceptional.

... But not to say, impossible.

By the time you read this, Steve Jobs will have just finished laying bare the major components of his plan to beat both the odds - and the competition - with a new and significantly re-organized company, vision, and products.

His - and Apple's - bid for that rare, "second chance".

Can it possibly succeed?

History - and some industry analysts like James Staten of Dataquest - would seem to say no. "Timing, is everything" - and Apple has simply run out of time.

But for many reasons, I think both are wrong and may well have met their match in Mr. Jobs' and the "new Apple".

Here's why...

While all the specifics of Monday's announcements are not yet known, a fairly coherent picture of Apple's overall direction and strategy for the future have emerged over the past few months.

First, what was once a single-platform computer company increasingly marginalized to the periphery of the industry and niche markets by, among other things:
- poor marketing, inefficient distribution, and declining market share;
- lack of an industrial strength operating system;
- inferior price/performance; and, perhaps, most key,
- an inability to attract and retain 3rd party software development

will over the next 6 months leap to [at least potentially]
leadership positions in each of the above areas.

How?

1. Extrapolating from the experience of other direct-sales PC companies, Apple should be able to realize a huge reduction [as much as 50%, eventually] in its present sales and product-related development, manufacture inventory, distribution and marketing costs, through it use of a Web and phone-based direct sales model. Result? Improved profit margins, greater volume, and rising marketshare - leading to a rapid return to profitability.

2. The introduction of new, streamlined, low cost-ultrahigh performance product lines designed to support build-to-order through the use of upgradeable CPU's and "personality" cards. Result? Reduced manufacture and inventory costs, greater availability, fewer lost sales and key customers;

3. Rhapsody [as the ultimate replacement for the aging, consumer-grade Mac OS] promises to be price and feature competitive with - if not superior to - Windows NT as an enterprise computing platform. With its ability to run on present [and future] low-cost/high performance Intel and PowerPC platforms; its "street-cred" as a Unix-derived OS; its _superiority_ over Windows as a rapid [read low-cost] object-based development environment for both Java and even Windows itself, Rhapsody can expect to gain serious consideration and acceptance as an enterprise computing solution. [See, e.g., Peter Coffee's preview of Rhapsody in PCWeek OnLine] Result? Apple could well end up leaping from marginal player to a leadership position in the corporate computing market. While the Mac OS was never a threat to Windows, Rhapsody - if it lives up to its promise - could well represent the most serious threat to Microsoft's future foundation - Windows NT;

4. A continuing string of strategic industry alliances and partnerships with the likes of SUN, IBM, Oracle, Adobe and other key enterprise computing players, fueled in no small part by reaction to Microsoft's market dominance, along with Rhapsody's superiority as a cross-platform software development environment can be expected to remedy Apple's recent problems with 3rd party business software development and availability. Result? Strong partnerships, ease of cross-platform development, and the superiority of Rhapsody's OS feature set should combine to deliver "killer apps" to the new OS and the Mac. Expect additional boosts in the form of "serious" [i.e., commercial grade] "shareware" apps and middleware solutions from new startups spurred by Rhapsody's object-based ease of development;

5. Delivery of several "breakthrough" technologies including high bandwidth wired - and wireless - networking; multimedia; communications; and Web-based solutions. Highly applicable - and commercially valuable - to today's new paradigm of the extended enterprise and distributed computing, Intra and Extranet solutions such as data warehousing, training, marketing and e-commerce, such solutions can be expected to find fairly rapid -and high profile - acceptance both directly and indirectly, through licensing, in markets _never_ open to Apple before.

6. Total Cost of Ownership ["TCO"]. While the verdict on NC's is still out, Apple can be expected to assume a leadership position in the area of TCO on the basis of a number of factors: reduced cost of hardware acquisition [low cost Macs, thin-client NC's, E-mate and Intel based Rhapsody platform solutions]; reduced cost of software development, deployment, and maintenance including network/Web-based software upgrade installation during off hours; reduced training costs due to Rhapsody's inherently superior interface and Mac-like ease of use; its capability for Intranet/ Web-based multimedia training; and its ability to deliver personalized - or uniform - user interfaces and workplaces to any workstation location on the network.

7. Lastly, and most importantly, Steve Jobs himself. Both in terms of vision - and the decisiveness of its execution - this shift in Apple's former paradigm of what computers should now do - and how the "New Apple" should market them - is pure Jobs. Perhaps, just as "only Nixon could go to China", Jobs is [probably] the _only_ person who could have stepped in and effectively put the brakes on Apple's legacy of years of excess and lack of focus - and pulled this transformation off. His ability to forge - or force - strategic alliances and partnerships; pressure or persuade people to do the unthinkable - or the impossible; to decide - and dazzle will undoubtedly be a major factor in the "new Apple's" ability to defy industry history, and succeed in gaining a "second chance". History may make most men, but now and again, [a few] men make history.

My money's on Jobs' succeeding.

The only thing I can't figure out - when I look at this comprehensive strategy and vision - its foundation and various components - is whether the "second chance" at finally "getting it right" that we're seeing here ... is Apple's? ... or NeXt's?

If the plan succeeds, though, it will hardly matter.

And if it fails, it will matter even less.
Your thoughts on this subject?

-John Paff

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Direct all mail on this column to me,jeffv@webspan.net and I will foward a digest to John.