Sculley: It was a "big mistake" I was ever hired as Apple's CEO

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Comments

  • Reply 21 of 135
    dasanman69dasanman69 Posts: 13,002member
    Why would anyone hire someone from Pepsi or Coca-cola is beyond me. That stuff sells itself.
  • Reply 22 of 135
    gqbgqb Posts: 1,934member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Kolchak View Post


    Now this is the kind of guy Microsoft needs to replace Ballmer with if they don't want to continue their slow but inexorable slide into irrelevancy.



    In other words, they need a guy what will just get it over with and drive straight off of the cliff? Maybe not a bad idea.
  • Reply 23 of 135
    cpsrocpsro Posts: 3,198member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Chris_CA View Post


    Sugar is a broad term. High fructose corn syrup is a specific type of sugar.



    Sugar is the common term for sucrose, a disaccharide of glucose and fructose. Corn syrup is largely composed of the monosaccharide fructose. The monosaccharide is more easily/rapidly metabolized, because the disaccharide bond of sucrose impedes its metabolization. This is why fructose in a soft drink produces more of a "rush" than does sucrose.



    In chemistry, "sugar" may refer to any carbohydrate or carbohydrate moiety.
  • Reply 24 of 135
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by BuffyzDead View Post


    You don't Ever ! want to get on Steve's Shit List !!!



    .... you are there for Life !!



    All is well that ends well...



    It is Better to light a Candle than to curse the Darkness...



    In a way, Steve Jobs' ousting "sent him into the wilderness for 40 days and nights" to prepare him for the days which are now upon us, and gave him perspective born of introspection and hindsight that he is putting to prolific use today.



    If only I could live my life again like Steve has so fortunately been able to; avoid the pitfalls and grasp the use-it-or-lose-it opportunities as they come hurtling by, to hit the ground running, knowing just what needs to be done and when to do it.



    You couldn't make this story up if you tried!
  • Reply 25 of 135
    I think Sculley has been fairly candid about this for quite some time, actually. And more credit to him for that.



    However, if Jobs really still does have an axe to grind about this business, he needs to take a deep breath and do some honest, detached introspection. Because if he had NOT been fired at Apple:



    1) He never would have bought, and nurtured, Pixar. (Think about the vast ramifications of THAT!)



    2) He would never have cranked up NeXt, which means he would not have had the freedom to start a whole new OS from the ground-up, with no concern for supporting legacy systems. (NeXt, of course, eventually morphed into OSX, which eventually evolved into iOS. What happens if THAT doesn't happen?)



    3) Possibly most important of all: If Apple had not come within a hairsbreath of death, Jobs would never have had the freedom to radically restructure the company the way he did.



    In other words, Stevearino... it's all part of the plan. So stop scheming, already. You can't control what's past, and it's a good thing, too. Let go, and be grateful things happened exactly the way they did!
  • Reply 26 of 135
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Mister Snitch View Post


    I think Sculley has been fairly candid about this for quite some time, actually. And more credit to him for that.



    However, if Jobs really still does have an axe to grind about this business, he needs to take a deep breath and do some honest, detached introspection. Because if he had NOT been fired at Apple:



    1) He never would have bought, and nurtured, Pixar. (Think about the vast ramifications of THAT!)



    2) He would never have cranked up NeXt, which means he would not have had the freedom to start a whole new OS from the ground-up, with no concern for supporting legacy systems. (NeXt, of course, eventually morphed into OSX, which eventually evolved into iOS. What happens if THAT doesn't happen?)



    3) Possibly most important of all: If Apple had not come within a hairsbreath of death, Jobs would never have had the freedom to radically restructure the company the way he did.



    In other words, Stevearino... it's all part of the plan. So stop scheming, already. You can't control what's past, and it's a good thing, too. Let go, and be grateful things happened exactly the way they did!



    Love this post. A++ +++++
  • Reply 27 of 135
    thomprthompr Posts: 1,521member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by bdkennedy1 View Post


    Steve was WRONG. Pepsi is made with high fructose corn syrup, not sugar.



    Steve was RIGHT. Fructose is one of the simple sugars. Whether it comes from processed corn syrup or sugar cane, it IS sugar.



    Thompson
  • Reply 28 of 135
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by dasanman69 View Post


    Why would anyone hire someone from Pepsi or Coca-cola is beyond me. That stuff sells itself.



    No, it doesn't, not by a longshot! Coke's marketing and advertising are legendary.
  • Reply 29 of 135
    dluxdlux Posts: 666member
    Not to detract from his current successes, but back in the day Jobs WAS too young (immature) to run Apple. Anyone who remembers him from the NeXT days knows the sorts of impetuous decisions and burnt bridges that came with Jobs' ego.



    In a way, I don't think Jobs' and Apple's current success would be entirely possible if he hadn't left to get some perspective and business experience with NeXT. Part of Microsoft's problem is they are so familiar and dependent upon Windows that they simply cannot think outside of that box. Jobs, on the other hand, spent a decade without Apple's steady income and Mac OS (ie. Classic) frame of mind. So when he returned he had the benefit of a clean slate, and defty managed the transition from Classic to OS X.



    Another thing Jobs learned when returning to Apple: Don't depend on anyone for anything. He knows that there is still a dependency upon Microsoft and Adobe for their big software platforms, but in the meantime Apple has slowly been creating their own alternatives. The same applies to technologies, which is why, when starting fresh with iOS, Apple cut Flash loose and created a platform that they control 100%.



    I used to hate Sculley back in the day (I worked as a contractor at Apple while he was still CEO) but can forgive him now with the passing of years. I think his conciliatory words are genuine - he's no longer in the tech game and has nothing to prove.





    Edit: Others have said pretty much the same thing while I was composing this.



    And can the pedants please let the sugar remarks go?
  • Reply 30 of 135
    blastdoorblastdoor Posts: 3,278member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Mister Snitch View Post


    I think Sculley has been fairly candid about this for quite some time, actually. And more credit to him for that.



    However, if Jobs really still does have an axe to grind about this business, he needs to take a deep breath and do some honest, detached introspection. Because if he had NOT been fired at Apple:



    1) He never would have bought, and nurtured, Pixar. (Think about the vast ramifications of THAT!)



    2) He would never have cranked up NeXt, which means he would not have had the freedom to start a whole new OS from the ground-up, with no concern for supporting legacy systems. (NeXt, of course, eventually morphed into OSX, which eventually evolved into iOS. What happens if THAT doesn't happen?)



    3) Possibly most important of all: If Apple had not come within a hairsbreath of death, Jobs would never have had the freedom to radically restructure the company the way he did.



    In other words, Stevearino... it's all part of the plan. So stop scheming, already. You can't control what's past, and it's a good thing, too. Let go, and be grateful things happened exactly the way they did!



    I totally agree with this. I think Jobs needed the experiences he had after leaving Apple. It appears to me that one of the most important lessons he learned (and it took a LONG time to learn it) was not to release products before the technology is ready. He has recently said that the iPad was put on a shelf for several years, waiting for the time to be right to release it. That's exactly what should have been done with the Mac. Apple should have continued to update the Apple II for several years and then in the early 90s they should have released a Macintosh based on a pre-emptive multitasking Unixy OS with a 32 bit processor.
  • Reply 31 of 135
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Dr Millmoss View Post


    It's misleading because in summarizing this brief "interview" (more like a statement than an interview, really), the key line was omitted: "The reason why I said it was a mistake to have hired me as CEO was Steve always wanted to be CEO."



    Taken in context, it becomes clearer why Sculley thought it was a mistake. The board's action set up an immediate conflict conflict between himself and Steve, which could only be resolved with one of them leaving. The board of directors, which was one of Apple's key limitations in those days, had wimped out. They knew the company needed "adult supervision" but weren't prepared to make the hard choices between the founder and someone who knew how to run a business. Between the lines we can read that Steve, as the chairman of the board, was a big part of the problem.



    Excellent post. Sculley is not admitting to anything here. More than anything he is laying the blame elsewhere and in parts to SJ himself.
  • Reply 32 of 135
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Philotech View Post


    ...

    Regardless, it's a rare confession.



    Indeed, rare ... and the frankness is welcome. Even if he has already made statements in earlier interviews to this effect, I think it's a breath of fresh air. Would love to see some ousted politicians be so forthcoming with their failures ... And I doubt that he sought out Leander at Cult of Mac just to expound on the trouble his CE(g)O-mania got him into, probably the other way around, but the article doesn't say either way.
  • Reply 33 of 135
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by GQB View Post


    Originally Posted by Kolchak

    Now this is the kind of guy Microsoft needs to replace Ballmer with if they don't want to continue their slow but inexorable slide into irrelevancy.



    Originally Posted by GQB

    In other words, they need a guy what will just get it over with and drive straight off of the cliff? Maybe not a bad idea.



    Behind all the energetic bluster and hyperactive enthusiasm, Ballmer is actually doing a great and thankless job of steering a massive Jumbo-jet into a graceful, slow glide-down from a 1000-pound behemoth to a more average-sized 500-pound gorilla.



    When you consider Microsoft's staggering market capitalization of the year 2001 or so, around $540 billion (gadzooks!!), where on Earth would anyone expect the company to go from there?



    With the massive war-chest available in its kitty, no-one can reasonably rule out Redmond from a comeback of Apple-esque proportions.



    Perhaps a return of Gates himself; now that would set up a show of epic proportions. Back to the Future?
  • Reply 34 of 135
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Splinemodel View Post


    No, it doesn't, not by a longshot! Coke's marketing and advertising are legendary.



    Exactly. It's easy to believe that a product "sells itself" when you've already been sold on it. In any event, Sculley wasn't brought on at Apple to be a marketer, he was there to run the company, to bring order to the big hairy ball of chaos that was Apple at that time.
  • Reply 35 of 135
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by myapplelove View Post


    Excellent post. Sculley is not admitting to anything here. More than anything he is laying the blame elsewhere and in parts to SJ himself.



    But only if you read past the headline.
  • Reply 36 of 135
    thomprthompr Posts: 1,521member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Mister Snitch View Post


    I think Sculley has been fairly candid about this for quite some time, actually. And more credit to him for that.



    However, if Jobs really still does have an axe to grind about this business, he needs to take a deep breath and do some honest, detached introspection. Because if he had NOT been fired at Apple:



    1) He never would have bought, and nurtured, Pixar. (Think about the vast ramifications of THAT!)



    2) He would never have cranked up NeXt, which means he would not have had the freedom to start a whole new OS from the ground-up, with no concern for supporting legacy systems. (NeXt, of course, eventually morphed into OSX, which eventually evolved into iOS. What happens if THAT doesn't happen?)



    3) Possibly most important of all: If Apple had not come within a hairsbreath of death, Jobs would never have had the freedom to radically restructure the company the way he did.



    In other words, Stevearino... it's all part of the plan. So stop scheming, already. You can't control what's past, and it's a good thing, too. Let go, and be grateful things happened exactly the way they did!



    I agree that this is a good post, but I think that Steve Jobs has already acknowledged this "part of the plan" idea, most famously during his "connecting the dots" commencement speech at Stanford in 2005. I don't think we need to preach to Steve about it anymore. If he wants to be pissed at Sculley - if he even really is - he might have deeper personal reasons. Maybe he doesn't like Sculley.



    Thompson
  • Reply 37 of 135
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Daniel001 View Post


    Agreed, I never expected him to be as frank or dispassionate as this. It's really a rare thing in big business (and everywhere else).





    It's not misleading. It doesn't matter who recruited him, this is just Sculley admitting he was a bad choice. Steve Jobs also acknowledged a long time ago that it was a bad choice.



    Sculley was not Jobs' first choice. That distinction goes to Don Estridge, IBM vice president of manufacturing, the man who brought to market the IBM PC, a product that shattered all sales records and won over the marketplace.



    In 1983, Steve Jobs tried to recruit Don Estridge as president of Apple Computer. Estridge turned Jobs down, and was killed two years later in a commercial plane crash, while flying for IBM. Had he accepted the Apple position, both Estridge and Apple would have experienced a dramatically different future.



    Sculley's decade long Apple legacy involved kicking Jobs out of Apple, jacking up the price of the original Macintosh by 25% to accommodate advertising, licensing away the Mac's IP to Microsoft for Windows, and green lighting all sorts of unprofitable fiascos that put middle managers in control of the company rather than engineers.



    No doubt an engineer such as Estridge would have made different decisions for the company than Sculley did.
  • Reply 38 of 135
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by LuisDias View Post


    So he shouldn't be "still mad"? If Jobs was so great back then, why did you betray him in the first place? Perhaps because you were tired of being the "facade" of a young brat that continuously kicked your arse in an humiliating way? And you are the one who "doesn't have an ax to grind"? You kid, surely. Why then the continuous interviews that you have made about the subject over the years, and the lack of them with Jobs? Yes, he may still be mad at you (he wouldn't be human if he wasn't, for crying out loud), but it seems that you are the one who doesn't like how you are going down on history: as Apple's greatest management blunder. Sorry pal, you had the shot and you blew it, now live your millionaire retirement up and fucking leave us alone.



    you showed him dude! way to go!
  • Reply 39 of 135
    Hindsight is 20/20. I worked at Apple from '87 to '92. John Scully was generally well liked for his marketing skills and calm temperament. He lacked technical vision, and relied on John Luis Gasse' who turned out to be quite an ego-maniac. As I recall, Scully left (was pushed out) around '90-'91 and Michael Spindler was elevated from COO to CEO. Spindler was a disaster! I can't really comment on whether hiring Scully or firing Jobs was the right thing to do. Things were much more fluid, in those days, and Apple was riding high until Microsoft launched Windows 3.x. It was pretty much downhill afterwords, until Apple acquired NeXT and Jobs returned to Apple. My own opinion is that things happen for a reason and Apple would not be the company it is today without the miscues...
  • Reply 40 of 135
    desuserigndesuserign Posts: 1,316member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Cpsro View Post


    The monosaccharide is more easily/rapidly metabolized, because the disaccharide bond of sucrose impedes its metabolization. This is why fructose in a soft drink produces more of a "rush" than does sucrose.



    Exactly. Which is why people object to the ever expanding use of high fructose corn syrup in processed foods. It makes otherwise ordinary or healthy food into high glycemic index foods which encourages people to over eat and leads to insulin resistance and eventual diabetes. Ordinary sugar does the same. HFCS just does it worse.
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