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The Great Entrepreneurship Myth promises that if you come up with a great idea and turn it into a company you will reap both fame and fortune. If that myth is part of your belief system, you should pay attention to the story of Adam Osborne.

Adam Osborne created a publishing company that explained computers to ordinary people and was snapped up by McGraw-Hill.

Adam Osborne built a computer that changed the industry and a computer company that grew faster than any company had before.

Adam Osborne created a company to make innovative, useful software and sell it at reasonable prices.

Any one of those should have been enough, enough for wealth and enough for fame.  But Adam Osborne died almost forgotten, in his sister’s home, half a world away from the scenes of his greatest business success.  It happened like this.

The Publishing Company

In 1974 Adam Osborne left a secure job as a technical writer for the Shell Oil Company and launched his own company to write and publish books about computers.  It was a success.

In five years the company published over forty books on computers.  They sold well.  One of them, An Introduction to Microcomputers, sold more than a quarter of a million copies by itself.

This was not the computer-on-every-desk-and-in-lots-of-pockets world of today. It was the mid-1970s and the personal computer industry was just coming into being.

In 1976 Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs finished the Apple I.  They founded the Apple Computer Company with world headquarters in Jobs’ garage.  Bill Gates was still a student at Harvard.

In 1977 Wozniak and Jobs got out of the garage and introduced the Apple II.  Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  The leading microcomputers at the time were the Commodore PET and the Radio Shack TRS 80.  Both used cassette tape drives to store programs and data.

In 1979 Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston demonstrated the first version of the VisiCalc spreadsheet.  That program would turn out to be the reason that lots of people would plunk down good money for a microcomputer. That same year Microsoft moved to Bellevue, Washington, and Adam Osborne sold his publishing company to McGraw-Hill. Adam Osborne wanted to move beyond writing about computers and start building them and selling them.

The Computer Company

Osborne knew exactly what kind of computer he wanted to make and sell.  He wanted something that was small enough and light enough to be carried as luggage and fit under an airline seat.  He wanted it to be priced low enough that a person could buy one with a credit card.

He got Lee Felsenstein, a computer legend, to design the computer, which he called the Osborne 1.  He introduced the new computer at the West Coast Computer Faire in 1981.  It was almost what Osborne had imagined.

The Osborne 1 was about the size and weight of a sewing machine.  It tipped the scale at 24 pounds, making it “luggable” if not exactly portable.  It cost just $1795.  You could buy it with a credit card.

But wait, as they say, there’s more.  The Osborne 1 came with software.  You didn’t have to go out and buy the software like you did with other computers of the time.  It was good, useful software, too.  There was a word processor (Wordstar) and a spreadsheet (SuperCalc).

Sales took off.  In 1981 Osborne sold $5.8 million.  In 1982 the company sold almost $70 million and was generating sales at the rate of $10 million per month.  Adam Osborne became the darling of the media, the man whose company was growing faster than any other company had ever grown. 

Adam became a celebrity and overconfident at about the same time.  In May 1982, a company spokesperson told the Christian Science Monitor that she wasn't worried about competition or anything else.  She should have been.

There were some design features that needed fixing.  The screen was tiny, for example.  Production quality definitely needed work.  A staggering number of computers simply didn’t work and many of them made it all the way to a retail store or customer before anyone found out.

Osborne brought in professional management to run the company and they started finding business problems everywhere.  There was a lot of bad debt.  Some $10 million in cash was unaccounted for.  The new CEO cancelled a planned public stock offering.

The market changed, too. Kaypro Corporation came out with a computer much like the Osborne 1, only with a bigger screen and higher reliability. Then, in August 1982, the IBM Corporation introduced the Personal Computer.  It offered several technical advances.  IBM had a stellar reputation and massive marketing muscle.

In early 1983 Osborne announced that his company was going to release a new IBM-compatible computer.  The company was nowhere close to being able to do that.  The main effect of the announcement was to kill the sales of the new model Osborne had just introduced. Osborne Computer went bankrupt in October. 

With time on his hands and a need to justify himself, Osborne wrote his autobiography, Hypergrowth.  The rise and fall of Osborne Computer would establish a pattern of rags-to-riches-to-rags that future computer companies would follow and the book would be a model for self-serving autobiographies, as Osborne blamed just about everyone but himself for the problems at Osborne Computer.

The Software Company

Most folks would be satisfied with one great business idea in a lifetime.  Osborne had already had two of them, but now he came up with a third.  Like the others it grew from a simple observation.  Most people thought software cost too much.

Adam Osborne was part of a generation whose reading horizons had been broadened by paperback books.  He thought software could have similar impact and name his company Paperback Software.

The software was pretty impressive.  There was a database program that offered the ability to enter data in three dimensional tables. Expert systems were getting a lot of press then.  Osborne’s Paperback Software published a program that sold for $249, ran on a common PC, and let users develop simple expert systems. 

There was a spreadsheet program, too.  It was the spreadsheet program that got Osborne and Paperback Software into trouble.  This time the trouble came in court.

Lotus Development Corporation was founded by Mitch Kapor in 1982 and introduced its spreadsheet program, Lotus 1-2-3, the same year.  It quickly became the class of the spreadsheet programs.

Paperback Software designed their spreadsheet program, VP Planner, to work just like Lotus 1-2-3.  They touted this as a benefit in their advertising with phrases like: “...workalike for 1-2-3.....designed to work like Lotus 1-2-3, keystroke for keystroke.....everything 1-2-3 does, VP-Planner does...”   That turned out to be a big mistake.

In January 1987 Lotus filed suit against Paperback Software for copyright infringement.  Osborne argued that Lotus could not copyright its “look and feel” and that VP Planner had many features that were different than Lotus 1-2-3. The court disagreed and, in June 1990 ruled in favor of Lotus. Paperback Software went out of business.

The End

In 1992 Osborne started his last venture.  He called it Noetics Software and said that the company would explore cutting edge topics like neural networks and their application to computer programs.  It might have turned into his fourth good idea.  We’ll never know.

By 1992 Osborne was having increasingly severe health problems.  He went to live with his sister, Katya Douglas, near the Kodiakanal Hill Station in southeast India. 

This was really a home coming.  Osborne’s father was a writer and teacher of Eastern religion and philosophy and Adam had spent his early years in this part of the world.  Now, home again, his successes and failures in the computer business were left behind.  He didn’t speak of them.

We can speak of them, though.  The story of Adam Osborne shows us that a good idea is not enough for business success.  You can have a great idea but be lousy at execution.  You can have a great idea and be outflanked by the market or the legal system or bad luck.  But Adam Osborne left that debate and analysis to others and went home to India.

There he was not a man who went from a standing start to billionaire and to bankruptcy all in three years. There he was Vellaikara Tamizhan, the White Tamil.  He was not a legend of the computer business.  He was a man who loved roses.

Adam Osborne died quietly at home on March 18, 2003. He was 64. None of the major business publications marked his passing. 

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.