I was one who for years looked at Sculley with derision, but after seeing an interview or two (this was a decade or so back), that changed. Yes, he was not Steve, but Sculley didn't harbor any ill will with Steve and I think did try pretty hard to move Apple forward. Like others said, the Mac II line came out under his watch and later the PPC. Both were pretty solid and well-regarded.
Apple was facing some major headwinds in the 90s in the market with Windows, especially when 95 came out, making it even tougher. Of course Jobs came back and we all know what happened. In addition to having a great OS in NextStep and his natural ability to understand what people wanted, he had grown as a business leader.
I think it's important to remember that neither Jobs not Sculley ever invented anything. They provided overview, guidance and parameters -- and enabled the Geeks to do their best geeking.
That's fairly obvious with Sculley but near heresy to say about Steve. But even Gates mocked him for being non-technical.
But, that doesn't mean that both were not geniuses in their own right. Geeks need geniuses like that to lead and guide and enable and to see the bigger, longer picture.
Jobs wasn’t a true engineer but he did have an uncanny sense of how a user would want to interact with a device.
Don't forget the ability to create a compelling story about why the device matters to the average person. And since 90% of running a tech company is convincing non-technical people to shell out for your product, those are arguably the more important roles.
Looking at that list, the hiring of Carly Fiorina along with the spinoff of Agilent was the beginning of the end of Bill and Dave’s original HP.
HP could have owned personal computing but for a lack of imagination. The section that became Agilent should have carried the HP name - their scientific instruments were 'to die for'.
I think it's important to remember that neither Jobs not Sculley ever invented anything. They provided overview, guidance and parameters -- and enabled the Geeks to do their best geeking.
That's fairly obvious with Sculley but near heresy to say about Steve. But even Gates mocked him for being non-technical.
But, that doesn't mean that both were not geniuses in their own right. Geeks need geniuses like that to lead and guide and enable and to see the bigger, longer picture.
Jobs wasn’t a true engineer but he did have an uncanny sense of how a user would want to interact with a device.
The early Macs lacked something I and many engineers wanted - a 'geek port' like the one BeBox computers running the BeOS operating systems had. From Wikipedia, the GeekPort was:
An experimental-electronic-development oriented port, backed by three fuses on the mainboard, the 37-pin D-sub "GeekPort" provides digital and analog I/O and DC power[13] on the ISA bus:
Two independent, bidirectional 8-bit ports
Four A/D pins routing to a 12-bit A/D converter
Four D/A pins connected to an independent 8-bit D/A converter
Two signal ground reference pins
Eleven power and ground pins: Two at +5 V, one at +12 V, one at -12 V, seven ground pins
Comments
Apple was facing some major headwinds in the 90s in the market with Windows, especially when 95 came out, making it even tougher. Of course Jobs came back and we all know what happened. In addition to having a great OS in NextStep and his natural ability to understand what people wanted, he had grown as a business leader.
If only...