When most businesses are in the market for IT services, whilst the requirements can vary greatly, they tend to revolve around making work faster, easier and more comfortable for their employees, who have a diverse range of computer skills and abilities.
The earliest blueprint for the modern desktop computer that has become a ubiquitous part of offices was first conceived as early as 1979, but only released four years later.
The Apple Lisa was not the first computer with a graphical user interface, with the Xerox Alto using one as early as 1973 and directly inspiring Steve Jobs when he joined the Lisa project.
However, it was the first mass-market computer with a GUI and was built out of the ultimately correct assertion that the future of computing would not rely on keyboards and command line entry but on an intuitively understandable system controlled using a mouse pointer.
It was frequently delayed, owing to the complexity of the interface itself putting huge demands on the most powerful consumer-grade processors available at the time, which also increased costs and forced the computer to sell for nearly $10,000 at launch, roughly the same price as a low-end workstation.
Being so new and unlike anything else on the market at the time meant that there were few application libraries available, making it hard to develop for and its interface made it fundamentally incompatible with the IBM PC, then the biggest business computer on the market.
Worse than this was the decision to kick Steve Jobs off of the project. He decided to take over another project and turn it into a cheaper, more focused version of the Lisa: the Apple Macintosh.
Rumours, allegedly intentionally leaked, spread before the release of the Lisa of a faster, cheaper version, which caused people to wait a year for the launch of the Macintosh, dooming the innovative Lisa to low sales outside of NASA.