Wednesday, September 14, 2011

John Sculley on Steve Jobs and the Experience of a Lifetime - Technology and IT Jobs News and Advice

Excerpt from an interview with lots of historical Apple insights

JG: You haven't spoken to Steve since you left Apple, or rather, he hasn't spoken to you.

JS: It is still a very painful story because we were not just business colleagues, we were good friends. We spent a tremendous amount of time together.

I think the separation was driven by Steve being in a real funk because the Macintosh, which he developed, was failing in early 1985. His vision was ahead of its time, the power of the microprocessor wasn't enough to do what he wanted to do and Mac sales were falling off.

We were still very dependent on the profits of Apple II. I felt we had to push profits of Apple II and Steve wanted to lower the price of the Mac to get sales up. We went to the board to decide.

The board made a decision and they asked Steve to step down as head of the Macintosh division. He still remained as chairman of the board.

But that was an incredible blow to the man who created the product, he was extremely hurt and pained by it.

To me, coming from corporate America, I was used to people being moved from job to job, because that's how it worked. Professional executives were reassigned, terminated, promoted all the time.

That's not what you do with founders of companies.

John Sculley on Steve Jobs and the Experience of a Lifetime - Technology and IT Jobs News and Advice

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