From where he sits, John Sculley (ex-Apple CEO) enjoys a panoramic view of the IT landscape. Read his interview at C|Net News.com.
John Sculley: Riding the Next Technology Wave
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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i really liked what he said about wifi. I couldnt agree more. Wifi is cool but the margins will go to nothing if they are not there already because its pretty easy to make a wifi chip set. Its not all that complex.
Technologies that do wide area mobile data, such as 802.16a and soon 802.20, are a lot more difficult to do. That alone will keekp margins reasonable for a bit. And services based on those will be easier to sell….more money.
I also like his views on unlicensed bands, like the 2.4 GHz frequency in which wifi operates. that openess really promotes innovation and competition.
did’t Apple fall to its all time lows under him?
Actually no. It fell to its all time lows under his successors Spindler and Amelio.
He couldn’t have been that bad. Obviously had foresight to some degree.
Scully set up Apple’s fall long before Spindler or Amelio got there. They accellerated the decline, but Scully clearly had the direction set before he left.
Personally, putting “Scully” and “technology” in the same sentence results in an oxymoron. I would not look to him for leadership or vision.
Actually, he was not. It was JLG’s and mostly Steve Sakoman’s project, not Scully’s.
be inc is defunct?
i wouldn’t invest in whatever company JLG is directing.
anyhow john scully destroyed apple, but i wonder if steve jobs would have done a better job
If you remember your history, Scully was running Pepsi when Steve Jobs convinced him to run Apple Computer (to paraphrase, “do you want to sell carbonated water the rest of your life?”). Scully then had Jobs kicked out.
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You can look at the success of NeXT to divine the success Apple might have had with Steve Jobs running the show in the late 80s/90s. Certainly, after a series of incompetent CEOs, Steve Jobs has improved Apple.
do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life
because he didn’t do Apple any favors. Look, no matter what Steve Jobs failings may be, he is probably the greatest visionary in personal computing.
Unfortunately, Sculley signed a deal with Bill Gates allowing Microsoft to copy Mac’s look-and-feel. Gates threatened to stop all application development unless Apple makes the deal. A real bad deal for Apple. Sculley blaimed his lawyers, but I think he was just stupid and ddin’t understand what he was signing.
Microsoft is a Mafia-like organization: Stac Electronics, Nestcape, GO Corporation. Just a small list of companies Microsoft has destroyed. GO developed PenPoint OS and MS started demoing PenWindows which was nothing more than a quick demo to kill PenPoint sales – “Look, Windows can do this too…” Oh, and did I mention DR-DOS?
I almost want to chock when I read these articles and comments. Sculley had poor vision of the past, present and future of Apple!
His only vision that he had was to use Apple Computers and his position to campain for Bill Clinton the 90’s and that’s it! The company was going in all different directions and he did nothing about it. He has very little leadership skills just by what he did. He did ride the success of others in the company but you can tell in the article he did not even see that very well.
In a height tec company like Apple the fruits of a CEO are most often seen several years later and many try to blame Spindler or Amelio for the failure. They inherited the mess from Sculley and even Steve Jobs. Face it Steve Jobs, as a CEO today, is many times better then the first time at Apple. I believed Amelio did more for Apple then anything Sculley did. Thats why Steve was able to look so successful when he came on board because of what little Amelio did before Steves second coming.
If Sculley is good or even great CEO then why is Sculley Brothers not just the greatest company they people are all standing in line to invest big dollars?
Sculley is just plain history in the high tec world.
William
It was dumb of Jobs to bring in an executive from an old world company like Pepsi into a young company that relies on innovation. Scully had no clues about managing a dynamic company that needed to have new interesting products on a regular basis.
Condsider the life span of the Pepsi product (infinite basically) versus that of a single computer product (a few years). Two completely different worlds of management. Scully couldn’t handle the change.
Jobs erred in bringing in Scully. Scully failed as we all saw. One of his biggest failures was that he failed in transitioning the Apple II into the 16-bit world (the Apple IIGS failed to keep pace with the competition). This caused the massive erosion of Apple in the schools (where the Apple II dominated). This also resulted in no one developing games for Apple computers.
Unless your computer system can handle games, it won’t be successful in the homes. The Macintosh failed on that score and the Apple IIGS wasn’t upgraded so it quickly become uncompetitive. So, in the 1990s, Apple didn’t have a gaming machine…Microsoft then steamrolled everyone. Atari and Amiga were destroyed by poor management as well.
Apple hurt itself with poor decisions and Scully was part of that big time.