Apple 1997 — radical focus

Survive 1997 and return Apple to profitability within a year

Apple was bleeding cash because it spread engineering thin across dozens of overlapping models, so no single product got the attention needed to be great.

A tightly integrated hardware-and-software stack and a design culture, behind a handful of products that rivals shipping commodity Windows boxes could not match.

Kill every product that doesn't fit a simple grid — consumer and pro, desktop and portable — and put all engineering behind those four products.

1. 01Cancel the Newton, the printers, and the Mac clones to stop the cash drain
2. 02Collapse the lineup onto the consumer-pro, desktop-portable grid
3. 03Ship the iMac as the single consumer desktop
4. 04Take a $150M Microsoft investment to secure Office on the Mac
5. 05Put the strongest engineers on those four products