Steve Jobs found Apple still selling a product he'd already killed. The task force he ordered that day is the one your product line is missing.

The LaserWriter was in the stores. So were the dot-matrix printers it made obsolete... still on the shelf, still being sold, with an Apple logo on the box.

Steve had already ordered them scrapped. Low-quality printouts, no graphics, outdated the day the new printer shipped. Withdrawn from the channel, every unit. That was the instruction.

Then he walked into a store and found them.

You've got one of these. It's the plan you stopped improving 2 years ago and never took off the pricing page. Or the SKU that's still there because the inventory's paid for. Maybe it's a feature somebody asked for once... you built it, you maintain it, and the customers it was for never came. It isn't losing money, exactly. That's why it's still there.

Here's what Steve did with his.

"It's become a crap product."

Jay Elliot was Apple's Senior Vice President at the time, and he tells the printer story in Leading Apple with Steve Jobs. The marketing people had a plan for the old inventory, and on paper it was a reasonable one. "That would mean taking a big loss," they said of Steve's order. "We can move them out at a steep discount."

The logic underneath is the logic most companies run on. A discount recovers cost. A product that's paid for and still sells is a product you keep selling. Nobody gets fired for moving old stock.

Steve understood the logic. He knew plenty of people would like the bargain of a cheap printer, even one that printed badly. Jay's summary of his reaction is 3 words long: he didn't care.

"It's become a crap product. Get rid of them."

"Blow them out," he ordered. Every one of them, dumped, whatever the company had to write off to do it. Jay's explanation is that Steve had the product focus, and the product focus meant one thing before it meant anything else: not selling inferior goods.

What replaced them

The thing to notice is what was sitting next to the dot-matrix printers on the shelf.

The LaserWriter didn't start as a printer. In The Steve Jobs Way, Jay describes Steve's fixation with Gutenberg... he'd bring the press up over and over, how it worked, what it did to the world. One day it hit him that the Macintosh wouldn't just put letters and numbers on paper. It would draw. Logos, flyers, anything with art in it. A machine like that deserved a printer that could print what it drew, and no dot-matrix printer could.

"We need something like what Gutenberg did," Steve said.

Jay's reaction, by his own account: oh, sure, how likely is that. But there wasn't time to invent a printer from scratch, and Bob Belleville had an idea. He'd seen Canon's laser copiers in Japan. Take one, build a card that translated what the Mac drew into what the copier could print, and you'd have a printer nobody else had. 6 people flew to Tokyo to find out: Steve, Bob, 3 engineers, and Jay. On the flight over, the engineers built a cardboard mock-up of the biggest card that could fit inside the Canon machine.

That's the printer that was in the stores. So the old product wasn't killed into a void. It was killed toward a standard. A better thing already existed, with the same logo on it, and the old thing on the next shelf was saying something about that logo every day it stayed there.

The aftermath

Jay's position on the write-off never softened. If you're that committed to a brand and the brand is working, taking the loss is always right. The alternative, in his words, is "screwing your clients because you've got a bad product and you've got to move it because of cost." He didn't see a version of that where the discount was the responsible choice.

There was a second order that day, and it's the reason this is a series and not a story. Steve told Jay to form a task force "to make sure we don't have any other crap products we should be getting rid of."

Jay gave it a name. Steve loved the name. Who sat in the room, and the rule it ran on, is Part 2.

What Jay doesn't claim

Jay never gives a count for the dot-matrix inventory or a dollar figure for the write-off, so neither do I. Nothing here is a claim about the LaserWriter's price or what it did to the competition. And the dialogue is as Jay recorded it, reconstructed from memory, which is a note he makes himself in the book.

The turn

A discount doesn't recover the cost of a dead product. It sells your reputation at the same markdown.

Look at the timing again. At the exact moment Apple was asking people to believe in the LaserWriter, a discount would have asked the same people to pay for a printer Apple had stopped believing in, under the same logo, in the same store. The write-off bought back the brand's word. That isn't sentiment. It's arithmetic that never shows up on the inventory line.

The standard underneath it is 1 question: would we ship this today? If the answer's no, the product doesn't get discounted. It gets pulled.

The standard Steve was enforcing has 4 questions behind it... the ones Jay asked of every product in the room. They're Day 1 of the free 5-day course, and Day 3 is this story's exercise. Start the 5-day course →

Run it on your product

1. Write down everything you sell. Plans, tiers, add-ons, the legacy version, the things you'd never put in an ad. 1 page.
2. Next to each one: would we launch this today, as it is, at this price? Yes or no. "With a few fixes" is a no.
3. Every no is a dot-matrix printer. Write what you're doing with it right now. Discounting it. Bundling it. Leaving it on the page and hoping.
4. Pick 1. Decide this week: fix it to a yes, or pull it. "Move it out cheap" isn't on the list.

What this doesn't do: it tells you which product fails the standard. It doesn't tell you why. That's the 4 questions.

In this series

1. This one.
2. Every product with an Apple logo had to walk into a room and justify its existence. Available October 14
3. Nobody on Apple's task force judged a product from a spec sheet. They took it home. Available October 15
4. Apple scrapped 200,000 computers priced up to $7,800 apiece. The reason wasn't the money. Available October 16
5. Steve Jobs couldn't say it. The 5 words he finally managed. Available October 17
6. How to run the Stop Crap Products Task Force on your own line this week. Available October 18
7. Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975 and buried it to protect film. The task force question nobody wants to ask: is the product paying your bills the one blocking your next one?