The Death of eWorld

Apple’s eWorld wasn’t necessarily the worst idea they came up with in the 90s before the return of Steve Jobs.  But it was so badly executed and came at such a bad time that its demise was pretty much inevitable.  That it represented at times some of the greatest hubris a company well known for its high regard for itself has exhibited only adds some spice to the tale.

The eWorld Box unfolded – before iMacs there was eWorld

From a distance, the whole thing seemed like a reasonable idea.

Apple had an online service already called AppleLink.  It was awkward and painful to use, but in an era when almost nobody had a dial up service option for support to get things like drivers without having physical access to Apple, it was ahead of its time.  The whole thing ran on GE’s online service, which also supported its GEnie online offering.  In 1985 this was ahead of the curve.

By 1992 AppleLink was dated.  Even its modem connection scripts looked like something from a bygone era.  And America Online was doing things with a happy, friendly UI that left GEnie and CompuServe looking like command line relics.

To simplify the story greatly, Apple decided to make an AOL-like online service using AOL’s Macintosh client, which they had licensed.

The established version of the tale of eWorld, which you can read over at the Wikipedia article I have linked, is that the service never really caught on and Apple shut it down after not too long and moved all their stuff to the web, which is where everything was headed in any case.

What that very brief version of the tale lacks is the color of what was really going on at Apple and the eWorld team.

At the time I happened to be dating a woman who was working with the eWorld team and she had no end of tales about how full of themselves the eWorld team was, how they were absolutely sure they would show AOL and everybody else how it was done, and how absolutely convinced they were nothing could stop ultimate success.

I heard several times that the cockiness of the venture came straight from the top where the catch phrase was something along the lines of, “I’ve already made up my mind, but go ahead and give me your opinion.”  The meaning was that there was nobody who could tell them or teach them anything, they knew it all and were going to bring Apple to new heights.  Success was assured merely because it was an Apple product.

The idea that the world wouldn’t bow down and acknowledge their genius for serving up a re-skinned version of AOL, with less total content and very little to distinguish the service, never seemed to occur to them.  It was, from my vantage point, the height of hubris for the “sans Steve Jobs” era of the mid 90s… and that is saying something, because the company has always been extremely full of itself.

The eWorld project happened to line up with Apple’s attempt to expand its hardware market penetration via the Macintosh Performa line of computers.  Computers, up to that point, were very much aimed at hobbyists and the technically minded.  They were not end user friendly.  Even Macs had their issues on that front.

One key issue was once you bought a PC and got it running… now what?  You need software to do things and peripherals and guidance and blah blah blah.  So the Performa line sought to bundle a bunch of that together with a guided user experience.

That included adding in a modem, and Global Village was the company that Apple chose to partner with on that front.  It started with the Teleport Bronze II 2400bps modem, which was fine and dandy in 1993, but modem speeds were rising and Apple did not want to be left behind.

Enter the Teleport Gold II.

GV already HAD a 14,400bps stand alone modem, the Teleport Gold, but it cost too much.  Apple wanted a cost reduced model so as to keep the Performa prices in line.  They asked GV to develop a low cost 14,400bps modem using a special minimal chip set that would offload the error correction and data compression onto the computer CPU.  We did that, put it in the same inexpensive case that the Bronze II had been put in, with its cheap design, and the Performa team was happy with it.  In fact, they were happy enough that we did several additional modem projects with them because the Teleport Gold II was fine and cheap and filled their need.

It was, however, a different chip set than our original and we had to write a modem driver specifically for it for all of the major online services.  You couldn’t just use the original Teleport Gold driver.  And when I say “modem driver” I am over stating the case, as it was in most cases just an set of initialization strings for various modes that the software could call up and send to the modem.  The exception was the AppleLink script, because AppleLink pre-dated sanity in communication software design.  But even that wasn’t so bad.

So, for example, AOL took the driver we wrote for them, made it part of their next update, and once people had the driver the Teleport Gold II worked just fine.

Likewise, we wrote a driver for eWorld… it was the same as the AOL driver because eWorld was just reskinned AOL… and they apparently threw it away.

My assessment years down the road was that having to use AOL’s software galled the eWorld team… like many big companies Apple often has a “not invented here” attitude… and so they were determined to write and own every aspect of the software that they could, which included the modem driver for the Teleport II.

To this day I remember the name of the person they gave that task to, and I wasn’t even on the Teleport II project.  I sat next to the person who ran that GV side of the project and he was smarter and more competent than I ever was.  But the person on the eWorld side, they didn’t know what they were doing.  We would get an updated beta of their software, try it with all our modems, then tell them that the Teleport Gold II driver did not work… and they would ignore us.

We reported this at every beta update, sent them our copy of the driver multiple times, warned the Performa group that the eWorld team was ignoring us, and basically tried to head off the problem as best we could.  And we were ignored.

So, when the first Performa models shipped with the Teleport Gold II, they wouldn’t connect to eWorld.  This was kind of a big deal as the eWorld team hoped that all of these new, entry level users would make up a big part of their customer base, that a whole generation of new Mac owners would be guided into the online world by their software.

Things got heated.  VPs at their end were calling our CEO demanding something be done.  There were conference calls to review the problem, with the eWorld team taking the stance that the Teleport II was a bad modem that simply did not work.

And we would point out that AOL had no problems with it, that the modem driver was the issue, that we had reported to them that the modem driver was the issue on multiple occasions… all documented… and had provided a working modem driver every time we pointed this out, only to be ignored.

When faced with this the person at their end who wrote their driver would try to shift blame, complain that our documentation was bad, and basically try to throw any possible argument against the wall to defend their choice to ignore us.  And that person was able to convince the eWorld management of their case.

Their obstinate stance was such that there had to be multiple calls over the course of weeks to re-litigate the issue again and again.  They were going to find a way to blame somebody else for their screw up.  I actually sat in on one of those calls, even though it wasn’t my projects, because I couldn’t believe how hard the eWorld team was resisting the correct and obvious solution.  This behavior prolonged getting an updated driver…OUR driver… into the product.  And when they finally did, there was an extremely sarcastic release note about the awful Teleport Gold II modem finally being fixed with their software.  They couldn’t let it go, they couldn’t own up, they couldn’t admit their error.

But it was too late.  The Performa computers came with lots of software pre-installed, including AOL, and AOL worked with the modem and the new users were much more likely to know about, and know somebody on, AOL in any case.  So there was no bounty of new users for eWorld from the successful Performa product line.

Now, to be clear, eWorld, as it stood, was never going to be a long term success.  Even if every Performa user with a Teleport II modem was able to sign up for the service, there wasn’t a lot of “there” there to be seen and a Macintosh only service was always going to be an outlier.  There was no compelling reason to use eWorld and it was only outstanding in its mediocrity both in design and execution.  The Performa gaffe just made the end come a bit more quickly because even had it met all of its goals, the coming of direct connection to the internet as the default route for most users in the next couple of years would have sealed its fate the way it sealed the fate of AOL.

I mean sure, AOL is still technically a thing.  It survives based on a lot of boomers at my mother-in-law’s end of the generation who still get their email from the site and still pay $4.95 a month for the privileged. (True story, my mother-in-law still pays for AOL.)  But that is a legacy business, destined to die off with the aging clientele.  So eWorld was going to die sooner or later.  I feel pretty confident Steve Jobs would have killed it had it not be put in the ground before his return.  It has an aesthetic he would have despised.

In the end, eWorld’s failure was arguably a good thing.  Sure, it was a big waste of money, but hardly the biggest one in that era.  And in the end Apple rightly threw in the towel on running their own online service.  No more AppleLink or eWorld.  Everything was moved to the World Wide Web.  Apple.com was the destination… and that was going to be the future anyway so it was better that they got on the right path a couple years earlier than they might have otherwise.

So in March of 1996, less than two years after its launch, eWorld was shut down by Apple.  It made barely a ripple in the expanding online world and only the few users who found some sort of community there really noticed its passing.

Related:

• Wikipedia – eWorld
• MacWorld – Remembering eWorld