Editing Power Computing Corporation (section)

=== Market success ===
In May 1996, just one year after Power Computing started selling Mac clones, the company reached the 100,000 units sold milestone.  The number of employees had grown to 300.  And as noted in an article in ''The Wall Street Journal'' (WSJ) by Jim Carlton, Power CEO Steve Kahng “still hasn’t taken his (golf) clubs out of the bag” (he had vowed not to play another round of his beloved golf until he had shipped the first 30,000 Mac clones).

That same WSJ article noted that one-half of Power Computings's customers represent people who would have otherwise purchased a computer from Apple. The others are people who might have bought a non-Mac computer.

: ''There is no question Apple is losing sales to us, but we are also expanding the Mac market," says Geoff Burr, Power Computing's vice president of sales and marketing.''

: ''Still, unless Apple can rapidly expand its cloning operations -- a goal of new Apple CEO Gilbert Amelio -- to boost flagging Mac market share and generate enough new licensing and software revenue to offset sales lost to cloners, Apple could see its belated cloning campaign backfire.''

In June 1996, Kahng persuaded a unit of [[Lockheed Martin Corp]]. to buy 3,000 of his computers rather than Apple's. Though a longtime Apple customer, Lockheed Martin said Power beat out Apple's bid by agreeing to such extras as loading in special engineering software before shipping the machines out, a request that Apple declined.  This was the largest sale in the history of Macs or Mac-compatible computers at the time.

Kahng was able to leverage his strong relationship with [[IBM]] to get access to the fastest PowerPC processors sooner than anyone else.  As a result, starting in April 1996 and continuing through 1997, Power Computing regularly put out the fastest computer system in either platform (Mac OS or WinTel).

* In April 1996, Power Computing unveiled the PowerTower, based on the 180&nbsp;MHz and 166&nbsp;MHz PowerPC 604 processor (announced by IBM on the same day). These were the fastest Mac OS personal computers available at the time.
* Three months later, in July 1996, Power Computing was back with an even faster system – the PowerTower Pro which marked the worldwide debut of the new PowerPC 604e microprocessor featuring [[clock speed]]s of up to 225&nbsp;MHz, making the PowerTower Pro the fastest personal computer available.
* May 27, 1997 – PowerTower Pro 250 outperformed all comparable Pentium and [[Pentium II]] class Windows-based systems that were shipping at the time.
* Aug. 4, 1997 – PowerTower Pro G3 275 and PowerTower Pro G3 250 would have been the world's first desktop systems using the new PowerPC generation of processors except that they were never built.

By 1997 Power Computing had reached $400 million in annual revenue, and reviews consistently rated its products as better than Apple's.{{r|beale199711}} At Macworld Expo 1997, the company presented a military-themed campaign that urged the Mac faithful to “Fight Back.” Power Computing employees were outfitted in camouflage. The video wall looped “why we fight” propaganda.  And “Steve Says” posters, flyers and T-shirts were ubiquitous inside the [[Moscone Center]] as well as in the streets surrounding the convention center (where Power Computing-logoed [[Hummer]]s, with bullhorns blazing, circled the center). Stickers and flyers featuring Steve Kahng are prominently featured in the TV show, ''[[Austin Stories]]''.