Negotiating the Apple deal

What were your first steps to get your foot in the door?
Well, the first few months I did not make a whole lot of progress, but I made a lot of friends. When I first started negotiating a license with Apple in April of 1994, I did not know one person at the company. But I did a lot of homework--I did not open my mouth until I studied everything very thoroughly and understood pretty much every issue and would know what the response would be when I asked certain questions.

Once your foot was in, what then?
I began to understand the internal structure for Apple's decision-making process. I made several friends at different levels of the company who could go to bat for me. And then later on, I went and presented my business case.

What was that business case?
I proposed a different strategy. In the PC world, about 20 percent of computers are sold through a direct channel, whereas Apple is selling through distributors and dealers only. I basically offered an alternative solution which they needed to fill to meet their customers' requirements. I was also able to convince them that I have strong backers, both corporate backers as well as venture backers, who could make this successful.

When did the big breakthrough come in these negotiations?
The breakthrough came just before Comdex in October of 1994. They told us they would be giving Power Computing a Mac OS license. Apple intended to give its licenses by the end of that year and I was the one who was ready to start production. We were able to prove that we had a good engineering team who could execute.

What issues is your company facing today?
When a company grows as quickly as us--at 40 percent growth per quarter--you're always running in a chaos mode. You're always in a panic and there is not as much structure as you want to see. So we're now spending our efforts building a culture and communicating to employees so we're all going in one direction.

What does Apple's acquisition of Next and the future development of a new operating system mean for your company?
We will support the Next operating system, which is basically the next technology. Basically, it gives us our next-generation and advanced operating system in a timely manner. It's too early to say when we'll ship, but we hope to within one year [after Apple releases its version on their machines].

NEXT: BeOS and the Mac clone future