“As Apple’s CEO introduces his new iPhone today, and its market cap passes Microsoft’s, the man who infamously fired him, John Sculley, tells The Daily Beast’s Thomas E. Weber about his regrets, their rift – and how their partnership could have worked: Jobs should have been CEO, and Sculley’s boss, rather than the other way around. Plus, other 1985 board members on Jobs then and now, and where they are today.”
No point rewriting history.
If Jobs didn’t get fired, maybe Apple would not exist today.
It’s too difficult to say. Maybe it would exist but in a different form. It’s highly likely that it wouldn’t be as successful as it is now.
Ah, humans…
Oddly enough, I don’t think Apple or Steve would be where it is today if they hadn’t fired Steve. For some people, it takes failure to temper them (and he needed lots of tempering), and give them perspective. If he hadn’t been fired, Apple probably still would have lost, and we wouldn’t have Pixar on top of that (sold to Steve by George Lucas because Lucas needed to cash for his divorce settlement).
Reminds me very much of when Edison was said about all his unsuccessful light bulb designs: “I found 99 ways of how not to make a light bulb”. I’m sure if Steve had a frank interview he would say he wouldn’t change a single thing if he had to live his life again – through each mistake we learn and we grow. In the case of Steve Jobs, you’re correct, he tempered him and that is why we have what we have today – a top notch operating system that spans from server to desktop to hand held devices using a common core and shared technologies.
Definitely revisionism going on there. Sculley was a hugely successful CEO who made one huge error that cost the company billions and massive market share: the license that gave Microsoft the right to copy chunks of the Macintosh interface.
Under Sculley Apple grew in huge strides but once Microsoft got Windows right, it was all downhill from there.
Jobs probably couldn’t have grown the company the way Sculley did; he was too immature but one will never know for sure.
Well…..we do know a lot of people got good and utterly screwed by NeXT. And that was Jobs’ baby.
bwaahaahhaa .. that made my day.. seriously.. i’m still waiting for multiuser, multitasking and drag’n’drop
Try windows NT4 and later =p
What license are you referring to, exactly? If memory servers me correctly, Apple Sued Microsoft for copying the UI. I don’t think that suite was settled until Jobs came back and MS made the investment in Apple.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corp… for the full story. Part was settled in 1994, the rest in 1997 via negotiations after Jobs returned.
Ok, I understand the license agreement played a big part in the court case. Its difficult to say for certain what the outcome would have been, if not for that contractual agreement. However,my personal opinion is that it wouldn’t have mattered.
I really don’t think most people would want to live in a world where Apple had won that lawsuit.
And thank god he did! Seriously, can you imagine what the world would be like if Apple had had a monopoly on WIMP interfaces and won the battle for the desktop? Inflated prices for inferior hardware, an operating system with no competition and no reason to improve, the entire consumer computing market held hostage by the whims of a single company? I for one am glad this isn’t the world I was born into.
So Steve Jobs is a hero then is he? All his ideas then? I’m surprised he doesn’t help on the assembly lines. Perhaps he should go over to Foxconn in China and help out seeing as suicides at the factories there are making the news. Maybe they should change the company name to “Steve Jobs” rather than “Apple”. Feel sorry for the product managers, marketing managers and all the other respectable people at Apple that get absolutely no credit for any of their achievements. Too bad then.
Hero? Maybe not. But it’s hard to argue with his various successes (although that doesn’t stop people from trying).
Woz was a genius with electronics and created the devices, but they would have been engineering curiosities without Jobs tenacity in lining up vendors, sales deals, etc.
Jobs also created two companies after getting fired from Apple, Pixar and NeXT.
Pixar by all accounts is an amazing company creating quality films time after time after time, with a track record that Disney couldn’t even come close to (so they bought ’em). Pixar was a success because Steve stayed out of the way. He did the deal making, but day-to-day operations was handled by the creative team.
NeXT was initially a failure, but it’s likely he learned quite a bit from those failures, and his failures at Apple. It still got bought for 400 milllion, and brought Steve back into the fold. The software became the basis for Mac OS X and iPhoneOS (iOS).
Apple has had its share of duds since Jobs returned, but plenty of blockbusters. And Jobs obsession with user experience, form, and build quality have translated into better products all round. Think of the smartphone market, the iPhone was a kick in the ass of smart phones, and it sparked a wave of innovation from all the vendors. It’d doubtful Android would be where it is today if it wasn’t for the iPhone paving the way for smart phones and show a model of success.
Sure, there were smart phones before the iPhone, but once the iPhone came along they changed substantially because the iPhone had stumbled upon a successful consumer model. They figured out that people hate styluses, hate dealing with the technical aspects, and love big screens. They didn’t create an app market for smart phones, but they did find a model (app store) where they became insanely popular, so now Android/Palm/Nokia all have app stores. There were tablets before the iPad, but Apple figured out what people want in a tablet (as in they don’t want Windows with a stylus), at least enough for over a million to be sold (probably more tablets sold by Apple in a few months than in the past 10 years by all the other vendors combined).
I’m sorry to see no one said, “I’m really happy for his stellar success, but I’m *glad* I fired him.” From what I’ve heard of Jobs, he sounds like a schmuck and a fucking prick. Then and now. I’ve heard Bill has had fits of anti-sociality, too, but nothing like ol’ Steve #1. Rock may have described Wozniak in just as unflattering terms as Jobs (at least as far as the early years)– but Woz seems like he stayed consistently nice, at least according to Steven Levy, author of “Hackers.” (Remember, Woz also said “Pirates of Silicon Valley” was a fairly accurate depiction, even if particular details were wrong. So, Jobs really WAS an asshole.) He was right to jump ship before the Mac hit it big… I don’t think anyone sane would keep taking Jobs’ abuse.
Screw what people say about tempermental creative types, and lack of sociality with engineers and people more increasingly involved with the abstract, concrete, and… non-people. People may think money and fame is so important, but even if I was hypothetically offered billions to work with Apple, if I had to deal with Jobs… forget it. No sum of money, no matter how sickeningly large, would convince me to work with him.
many CEO’s around the world do a lot more than Steve Jobs. The nature of the position. Some CEO’s are good, some are downright nasty, the business world can do that to people. Steve Ballmer is no better and some of the CEO’s ive worked for are no better.
I’m not a big fan of Ballmer, either.
I agree 100% and also about engineers being anti social… that just isn’t the case we don’t go out of our way to make friends with anything that moves but my I have quite a few friends that are engineers (computer engineers even) I could even imagine starting a company with the given a stroke of genius at the right moment.
It wouldn’t take much to completely revolutionize computing naive you may say … tell that to Woz or the guys that built the c64 and Amiga It just takes people willing to get their hands dirty and get the job done. Even though jobs was an ass… he probably was instrumental in bringing the company up to a point where it was mature enough to fire him.
Edited 2010-06-08 17:09 UTC
You’re missing the forest for the trees, son.
Not all engineers, lab scientists, and researchers are disconnected from the world of people or have the ivory tower syndrome– but I’ve met a lot who do.
And while I can be analytical, I’m usually not logical. Therefore one of them can say something that seems perfectly sensible and rational in their minds, but they have completely missed the social nuances, the context, the intonation, that leads me to think they are condescending and emotionally out of touch.
I’ve dealt with the “you are such a NOOB/MORON for not knowing that/figuring that out” so many times from some segments of the I.T. world. As a Linux user, I will rarely engage said Linux (yes, even Ubuntu) community because finding out on my own and saying nothing doesn’t net me any attitude.
Good for you that you get along with them. But many people like this, they excel at pissing me off. Ironically, this is why I would never be comfortable working for Gates, Ballmer, *or* Jobs. I have heard too much about their snitfits and they remind me too much of people I do know. A consultant/coder/programmer tells me I should work for myself. Heh. Okay… again, such an ironic contrast…
Nah, I think Jobs in those days was probably a relatively cool guy to work for. He protected his engineers and tried his best to inspire them. For those who had the right kind of mentality to avoid fighting with him, it was probably a fun and rewarding experience. At the same time, was he immature and not yet cut out to be CEO of such a large company? Quite possibly.
Nowadays on the other hand I would rather not work for Apple. While it’s true that I’d probably get a chance to do really interesting and fun stuff, the politics of closedness and secretiveness would get to me. Way back when it would have probably been fine with me, but today Apple’s approach to product development and marketing is an anachronism of traditional, one-way-broadcast thinking that strikes one as almost fascistic when compared to the increasingly user-feedback driven approach that most other tech companies (including Microsoft) are taking these days.
Edited 2010-06-08 21:18 UTC
…and did so over the following years with NeXT… The great fall from time to time. Look at Ken Olsen and DEC.
Scully is off-the-mark because he’s not taking into account what the NeXT acquisition has meant to Apple. Without NeXT/OPENSTEP, there’s no OS X, no iPhone. Had Scully hired Jobs back, would any of those things been developed?
So we should thank him!
Before Jobs returned, Apple was an somewhat honest computing company with innovative products, enduring a crisis and on its way to be crushed by competition.
After, innovation gradually disappeared at Apple, in favor of a bunch of merciless commercial-makers who are ready to bundle computer and screen together or forcefully lead people to use a bloated media player in order to make profit, with an insane control frenzy.
In my opinion, it would have been better for Sculley not only to fire Jobs but also to shoot him. Preferably twice. However, we live in times were honor and moral sense are far less important than making money
Edited 2010-06-08 07:49 UTC
So, in your opinion Apple was more innovative before Jobs came back? And their products were better before he go there?
I guess parallel dimensions do exist where shooting someone twice would be more moral than allowing him to make money by selling electronics?
I’m not a fan of Apple’s products, but your version of morality and history are far different from what I would consider to be normal.
Well, yes, if we don’t consider innovation in the lock-in area (Can you remember something in the spirit of the App Store, iTunes, or the eMac, before Jobs returned ?), Apple was more innovative without Jobs as the CEO imo. It was just less good at actually shipping products.
As an example, take Copland, and compare it to OS X. Copland was an attempt at making a virtualization-based OS, while OSX is just a pretty graphical shell on top of Unix. Take the Newton (an innovative PDA platform with a microkernel-based OS and a pretty nice API), and compare it with the iPhone. Got it ?
The part about shooting him was a (lame) joke, saying that he did more harm than good imo. Except in the sales area.
Edited 2010-06-08 18:50 UTC
No, don’t get it at all. We aren’t even close enough to argue. What colour is the sky where you live? Do you have flying cars? How many donuts are in a bakers dozen?
Sky color : Light gray, with some shades of blue here and there. Just the kind of weather which I like, maybe a bit cold and moist but perfection doesn’t exist…
Flying cars : Yes, but only after being hit by a massive obstacle, and generally not for a long time.
Donuts : Don’t know, bakers don’t sell donuts around here… =p
The Newton was innovative, it clearly brought something new. Before it, the sole concept of PDA was still close to inexistant. The iPhone, on the other hand, was just a mix of well-known existing technologies (like low-capacity batteries, EDGE networking, 3″ screens, an UNIX-based operating system with shiny buttons in its UI to conveniently hide its horrible and far from GUI-optimized internals, a lock-in powered model on a phone, and so on).
Since Jobs came back, innovation gradually disappeared at Apple. Back in the Macintosh days, when he was not even CEO, he was already killing it by asking for a copycat of xerox’s technological demo while the team was initially working on something more innovative. Now we’re still here : this guy has some business sense and knows how to put existing pieces of tech together. But he’s not an innovative guy, really.
Edited 2010-06-09 08:24 UTC
To better picture the iPhone’s lack of innovation, one should have a look at Palm’s ages old PalmOS PDAs, upgrade the internals to today’s hardware, polish the OS a bit more, put some EDGE connectivity on it, put an apple-ish look on the interface and the hardware, reduce everyday usability in favor of a more noob-friendly interface, and introduce an iTunes+App Store lock-in. You just made an iPhone. No serious innovation in each of these steps.
Edited 2010-06-09 09:00 UTC