Slashdot Mirror
Ex-Apple CEO John Sculley Dishes On Steve Jobs
digitaldc writes "Here's a full transcript of the interview with John Sculley on the subject of Steve Jobs. It's long but worth reading because there are some awesome insights into how Jobs does things. It's also one of the frankest CEO interviews you'll ever read. Sculley talks openly about Jobs and Apple, admits it was a mistake to hire him to run the company and that he knows little about computers. It's rare for anyone, never mind a big-time CEO, to make such frank assessment of their career in public."
His tradeoff was he believed that he had to control the entire system. He made every decision. The boxes were locked.
It wasn't only back then, it's especially true today. I don't know why everyone on slashdot seems to give him a free pass but say DRM, locked-down hardware, restrictions, end user licenses and so on are bad. Apple and Steve Jobs is basically everything that we should be against. Even Windows is open, even if you don't get the source code. Linux is obviously the best choice.
Steve Jobs still is extremely fanatic about having full control in everything. So much for all us geeks who like to play around with the hardware and learn things. If everything back in the day was as closed as Steve Jobs wants it to be now, do you think we geeks could have learned so much ourself? Just to code some simple hello world application you would have needed to buy a "coding" license from Apple. Not really feasible for a 10 year old kid who is just starting to learn programming.
Steve Jobs is a minimalist, heavy-handed, hard-driving, design-obsessed prick?!? Not exactly news.
And I'll say it once again. Considering the observation that Sculley makes that MS is all about hiring geeks and smart people and Apple is all about hiring designers and marketers ("Apple is a designers company, not an engineers company," as he says), it still amazes me that MS is so bashed on /. and Apple so celebrated. You would think the opposite would be true here. Are we still longing to sit at the cool kids' table or something, or have we just bought into that "lifestyle" shit too?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
it was a mistake to hire him to run the company and that he knows little about computers.
Ya right, I'm sure. I wonder if shareholders would agree...
So what the hell happened with System 7 and then OS 8? So much for "perfection."
I find it very difficult to believe that the man who has presided over Apple's astonishing march back into relevancy over the last couple decades could possibly be labeled "a mistake".
"I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
Just because Sculley didn't know about computers at the time, he assumes that nobody did?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Bloomberg recently posted a 48 minute video of Apple's history here. A lot of Sculley's interview comments made it into this video as well.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
FTA: "A big part of it was that we had to learn to make products the way the Japanese wanted products. We were assembling products in Singapore and sending them to Japan. And the first thing the customer saw when they opened the box was the manual, but the manual was turned the wrong way around – and the whole batch was rejected. In the United States, we’d never experienced anything like that. If you put the manual in this way or that way — what difference did it make? Well, it made a huge difference in Japan. Their standards are just different than ours. If you look at Apple and the attention to detail. The “open me first,” the way the box is designed, the fold lines, the quality of paper, the printing — Apple just goes to extraordinary lengths. It looks like you are buying something from Bulgari or one of the highest in jewelry firms. At the time, it was the Japanese."
These standards create better products that are deemed superior. Once that catches on, then others trying to compete will HAVE to match those standards in order for them to sell. This is a good thing for everyone. For example, Japanese cars were (and some still argue are) far superior than US cars. In order to stay in business US car manufacturers HAD to improve their design and quality standards to even compete with the Japanese. Now, US cars are much better quality than they were in the 70s, 80s and 90s and this is a good thing for everyone.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Some of us older geeks have trouble bashing Apple because we remember the Apple of Woz's day. It breaks my heart when, in a moment of nostalgia, I cry out "Apple ][ Forever!" and people think that means I like Macs. As far as I'm concerned, Apple stopped being Apple when Woz left, and I totally agree that Mac et al are about as closed architecture as you can get.
Say what you want, but the fact remains that Apple's stock is at an all-time high, and that it tripled in value since January 2009, vastly outperforming the stock indices. Someone must be doing something right. Jobs may know little about computers, but so do a majority of Apple's customers (yes I know a lot of geeks own macs but they're still a minority in Apple's clientele). What Jobs does know is what his customers want. It's probably extremely challenging for a more technically inclined person to work for someone who knows little about the technical side and keeps on asking for cool-sounding features ("no Steve, that's not possible with today's technology", "no Steve, that would be prohibitively expensive"), but a challenge is not always a bad thing. Apple's technology may not always be game-changing, but the tension between geeks and shininess/usability freaks does result in game-changing products.
Jobs didn't build anything. Engineers build computers. Jobs just took advantage of them. Scully is even more clueless. Anybody can put stuff into what they think is a pretty package. That's subjective.
Girls like Macs and Ipods and iphones. The nice thing about girls with macs is they dont bother you asking for free tech support since they rarely :)
need it and when they do they go to the apple store. They love their macbook with the same intensity as they love their cats. If a girl lets
you touch her macbook you know you are in a serious relationship. If a girl shows you her macbook she is expecting a compliment like complimenting
her shoes or her dress, it is not a random piece of technology for her it is a life accessory. If you want to get assaulted by a woman, mess with her
iphone... you do not touch a woman's iphone! If she shows you her first iphone, you are expected to oooh and ahhhh like she is showing you her first born.
The "lifestyle" accessories is a woman thing, which us male geeks can not possibly understand.
This is bullshit ! look at the first post !!! http://www.youmissyourlife.com/
Isn't Scully the guy that practically piloted Apple into the ground? Why do we care what he has to say then? Is Apple making shloads of money compared to when Skully was in? I'm not a Jobs fanboy but I think it's pretty clear he knows how to run his baby. I think Scully needs to STFU.
I dislike Steve Jobs a ton, I dislike the overly proprietary nature of Apple devices, I dislike most of my alternative options more. I've been into Linux since 1995, I've been in IT even longer, I appreciate open standards and things that work properly and freely. My next laptop and computer? Macbook Pro and an iMac. This coming from someone who has built computers since the 386 days.
I can still run Windows or Linux on them, they are solidly built with all of the features I need, real battery life on the MBP, iLife which is perfect for my photos and music hobby work, my graphics apps run better, no antivirus/malware/B.S. All this comes at about a few hundred dollar premium, but the time not spent delousing an infection here and there over a few years alone makes up for it.
The problem is that I used to love to hack and play and even if things were kludgy or inelegant, they worked. As I've gotten older I really don't need 4,000 choices, I just want one that works like it should the first time and every time. Does that mean I'd ever think of renting movies/TV from Apple or play into any number of their lifestyle and hip and trendy stuff? No. It's simply the right tool for the job for me and denying it for image or trend reasons is silly. If a purple hammer sunk a nail each and every time on the first blow, I'd happily use the purple hammer.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
He's also wrong on many details. The one that's most jarring to me is:
"... Herman Hauser, who had started Acorn computer over in the U.K. out of Cambridge university. And Herman designed the ARM processor, and Apple and Olivetti funded it."
Herman Hauser was a VC. He was one of the people who set up Acorn, but he didn't design the ARM CPU. The ARM CPU was principally designed by Sophie Wilson (instruction set) and Steve Furber (hardware architecture). Herman Hauser bankrolled it, he didn't design it.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I started using Linux in 1993. This summer I switched to Mac OS X in frustration over usability issues, despite my technical preferences. I'd gladly pay $$$$ for a Linux based system with the integration, polish, and commercial-product-availability of Mac OS.
Unfortunately, such a system doesn't exist and is unlikely ever to exist, which is why I am now a Mac OS user.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
John Sculley was the wrong man at the wrong time to run Apple. My criteria for saying so are simple: success. Jobs has always succeeded where Sculley was a disaster. Please understand that I am not a Jobs fanboy. He is not deserving of unlimited admiration for everything he does. Still there is the matter of Apple's stock being north of $300. Sour grape John. Very sour.
Like the inimitable Groucho Marx, I would never join a club that would have me as a member.
I'll hand it to Apple, In terms of "what I want" is always "What apple is currently offering + one component grade higher" , probably the entire reason I don't buy Apple too.
Apple releases the iPhone, meh, almost had me with the iphone 4, but the antenna issue killed it for me. Current iPhone is nearly as good as the Nokia N95 spec for spec and kills all current phones with the screen resolution/touch system.
Apple releases the MacMini, I bought one of the 1st generation Intel ones, price was right, it was somewhat upgradeable, and is fucking quiet, everything that most desktops and laptops from Dell, Sony, Toshiba, IBM, and HP aren't.
Apple releases the iPad. Don't I already have 3 PDA's? How much use did I get out of them? Fuck it, not buying one unless it does everything my goddamn cell phone does already (5Mpixel Camera, and a real GPS are missing.)
MacBook Pro? Would buy if they put 1920x1200 in the 15 inch model.
Mac Pro? Would likely buy if I was doing serious video work. For what I do, the mini works.
iMac? This is the problem, and I wish it would be rectified. I will never buy an iMac. Integrated screens belong in Laptops. If my cousin bob comes over and spills coffee on the machine, the entire machine is ruined, full stop. The iMac "Lamp" was actually a better idea because conceptually you could replace the screen component, but as implemented, wasn't great. It would be better for Apple to somehow make a "Desktop" model that would eat HP's lunch, but I don't ever see Apple making one because nobody wants to pay "more" for a nice unbreakable system, and instead buy shitty Dell's and HP's that are made mostly of cheap plastic won't even run 5 year old games. Wow How about that...
You can't play games on a Windows machine with shitty intel graphics, just like playing games on a Mac.
It's rare for anyone, never mind a big-time CEO, to make such frank assessment of their career in public."
That's not true, but it does reflect the media's obsession and perception of CEOs are rock stars, even using the reference to conjure the image of larger than life these people who head companies.
Frankly the truth is that business media, which is rarely actually news oriented (as in novel events and objective reporting; versus press release regurgitation), doesn't actually investigate the non-celebrity business leaders. In the present day United States they are mostly limited to privately held corporations, often of family owned businesses. In other countries the same trend is happening, though at a slower pace.
The media loves a "star" that they can gossip about, and call it news, it's cheaper and less effort than actually reading through SEC filings and quarterly statements and creating a spreadsheet. Not that many "business news" people can actually do and understand such a process.
Disclosure: I'm basing much of this on private conversations with Masters graduates of an internationally recognized university in England, and a book written by a financial / business news reporter. Sorry, I don't have the title handy.
Tomorrow Steve will announce the planned execution of OS X.
Goodbye computers. Hello locked down iOS appliances.
From the article:
Although not plastic, I'm pretty sure the Commodore PET had a (chiclet) keyboard inside the case and was first made public in January 1977, whereas the Apple ][ was first shown in April of 1977.
...but those guys don't sit around all day and whine that they're not allowed to tinker with the engine on their United Airlines flight.
Your example about software is absurd--you don't have to buy a "coding" license to write hello world on a Mac box. Absolutely absurd. I've compiled open source apps on my MacBook and I never gave Steve Jobs an extra dime for the privilege.
Wanting a phone or a computer that "just works" for nontechnical family members or even myself doesn't make me less of a nerd than you.
as if there was any doubt.
"admits it was a mistake to hire him to run the company" should be "admits it was a mistake to hire Scully to run the company." There, fixed that for you. The original summary implied that Scully felt that it was a mistake to hire Jobs to run the company. Actually, Scully felt that Jobs should have been made president when Jobs was 25 or 26 years old.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
Jobs can surely build beautifull products, but he also gets lucky on timing that he can bring the cost down to a level that comsumers are ready to pay for it. In the days when a PC costs 1500 and a Mac costs 3000, people choose PC, nowadays a PC costs 500 and a Mac costs 1000, people choose Mac. Try to build iphones in US and ask for 1000 apiece and see how the sales figure goes....
I know the interview is really long but Sculley does the exact opposite. Sculley may criticize some aspects of Jobs management but mostly Sculley is revering Jobs not dishing on him.
Some quotes (sculley about jobs):
"I’m actually convinced that if Steve hadn’t come back when he did — if they had waited another six months — Apple would have been history. It would have been gone, absolutely gone."
"It's ok to be driven a little crazy by someone that is consistently right"
Two things:
Firstly, Jobs isn't a dork, he's a jerk. An obsessive, abusive, megalomaniacal control freak, who will brook no dissent when it comes to achieving his vision (Android boss Andy Rubin likened Apple to North Korea, and it's instructive that Jobs's best friend is Larry Ellison, another brilliant, capable, world-class jerk). But what a vision it is. Ex-Apple employees have said that they have never been so concerned about being fired as when they worked at Apple, and of course there's the famous story that people are afraid to get into the elevator with him because they're terrified that they'll be unemployed by the time they reach their floor. But they also say that his vision is so compelling that they buy into it and will move heaven and earth to achieve it. Sure he's a jerk. So are Ellison, Zuckerberg, Gates, and many others, including Richard Stallman. But...so what? People are willing to excuse assholes if they deliver.
Secondly, he's absolutely responsible for Apple's recovery and current success, and only a fool would deny it. Sure Apple has many brilliant engineers and designers, but as CEO he's the one who sets the overall vision and direction, and decides what goes out the door, and he's been remarkably successful at it. It's well-known that there are a lot of ongoing projects that may never see the light of day if they don't fit his overall strategy, and to my mind Jobs is just as remarkable for what he doesn't ship. Remember the switch from PowerPC to x86? Many commentators were shocked to learn that Apple had ALWAYS had a parallel version of OS X ready to go if a change of architecture was necessary, and I'm willing to bet that there are mature, concurrent versions of OS X for other architectures as well, ready to go if something better comes along. Jobs is a minimalist, and is firmly of the philosophy that less is more. That philosophy is glaringly apparent, not only in the design of their hardware and software, stores, website etc, but also in the incremental addition of new features in subsequent iterations of their products. Sure they could have added copy-and-paste to the first version of iOS, but knowing Jobs, he wouldn't allow it if he felt that their implementation didn't meet his standards.
As CEO, he's responsible for more than merely shipping cool shit that the designers and engineers come up with. He has to set a vision and direct the talents of all the brilliant engineers and innovators (and marketers, retailers etc) to support his vision and Apple's business strategy. It's not enough to merely have enormous resources and armies of talent. A CEO actually has to do something with it. Why is it that Steve Ballmer is catching so much shit from analysts and investors? No one can truthfully say that Microsoft doesn't have legions of bright and talented engineers at their disposal, and they're still making obscene profits from Windows and Office, yet their stock has been flat since Gates relinquished leadership to Uncle Fester. That's a vote of no-confidence in his ability to grow Microsoft beyond their traditional markets, and with the fast-paced, fluid nature of the tech industry, it's a potentially a serious problem if they're caught flatfooted in a changewave. It's happening now with the rapid rise of mobile devices. Microsoft were left flailing by the success of iPhone and iPad, and Windows Phone 7 is seen as their last ditch attempt to remain relevant in that space. There have been rumblings that Ballmer will be removed if it fails in the market, and he desperately needs a monumental smash hit following his expensive, painful failures with Vista, Zun
Olivetti used to have a fascination with industrial design. Their machines are on display in in art museums. But they just weren't that good. It's not about case design.
Jobs's strength is that he focuses on the end to end user experience. This is rare. Even most retailers don't get it. One of the few that does is The Gap. In a Gap store, there's no checkout area clutter, and large, clear counter surfaces for doing the sale. Most retailers put vast amounts of impulse-buy junk near the checkout. (Visit a Bed, Bath, and Beyond to see the worst case.) It provides some marginal revenue, but it constricts the flow of customers and money, and cheapens the perceived value of the real products. The Gap avoids that, and checkout flow is smooth. That's the end to end user experience.
This is why Amazon's "one-click buy" was such a successful innovation. This is why iTunes is successful. This is why well designed icons matter. Read "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience", for a pop-culture analysis of the subject.
The end to end user experience is an issue in software. Microsoft sort of gets it, and they mostly have Word right. OpenOffice does not get it. Maya gets it. Blender doesn't get it. Autodesk Inventor gets it. SolidWorks doesn't get it.
The Linux community totally does not get this.
am not sure if it was /. but i distinctly remember reading this story a while back like a year ago maybe more.....does the same story gets resurfaced over n over again 'cuz u think people like to read this stuff over n over again !!
Q: But this control extends to every aspect of the product - even to opening the box. The experience of opening the box is designed by Steve Jobs.
Yep, Cult of Mac. Must be nice for Apple to have their own Hit Parader/Tiger Beat, I guess.
But Steve was thinking about something entirely different. He felt that the computer was going to change the world and it it was going to become what he called “the bicycle for the mind.”
There's a backstory to that http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VisNJDd51zA
who is stopping you? You can write and run whatever you want on Apple computers (Apple even provides you with Xcode for free), you can write and run whatever you want to run on your own iPhone/iPad for $50 extra. Hell you can even setup your own organization of iPhone's which are able to run your own apps without any editorial control from Apple.
The only thing you can't do is write shitty apps and release them unfiltered into the wild for unsuspecting users--and that is exactly because allowing you to do so would lower the value of their product to their customers, for the same reason that United doesn't want you fiddling with the plane that other passengers ride on.
Do you think Boeing will continue to support your plane after you fiddle with it? Do you think the FAA is going to allow you to fly it in controlled airspace?
Atleast slashdot editors should RTFA
This is for all the folks who aren't going to RTFA
- When Sculley says it was a mistake to hire "him" - he means it was a mistake to hire Sculley
- Sculley doesn't diss on Steve Jobs in the interview.
- The whole interview is a love poem about Jobs by Sculley.
I think it is a bit unfair to call the choice of the Power PC processor a mistake. At the time the 68K family was running out of gas and Motorola and IBM were pouring lots of money into the development of the RISC processor. RISC is a confusing acronom. What's important about RISC ISN'T the limited instruction set, but the fact that the small instruction set allows hardwiring of the processor rather than having to use a rom driven micro sequencer and lots of micro code. As Moore's law progressed and more transistors could be stuffed onto a chip you could build a CISC processor the same way. As a result the advantage the PPC had was slowly eclipsed and Intel's x86 designs pulled ahead. But there was a window of time where the PPC was a more powerfull choice. And Apple was in that window.
The article highlights the distinction that we Linux nerds have a hard time understanding -- simplistic and simplified are very DIFFERENT things.
The "shiny" feel of an iPod, iPad, or OS X comes not from its bright colors or physical polish, but from the fact that they have been obsessively designed, tested, re-designed, and re-tested without fear of throwing things out that do not belong. This is why the "me too" tablets that have the same technical capabilities and extra bells & whistles are going to have a hard time dislodging the iPad.
I personally do not own any Apple devices and am not crazy about their licensing -- but Apple has an inherent understanding of User Experience design that we can/should all learn from.
I've done a bit of programming for the iPod and was impressed with how easy it was to build beautiful looking applications -- and how integrated everything felt (from the design tools to the compiler), even though Objective C seems like a weird C++ from a parallel universe to me...
Vi or Emacs?
http://saveie6.com/
for far too long. I owned nothing Apple and had limited experience with Apple products from about 1985-2008. My biggest experience was with Newton, which I actually liked a lot, but of course that was some time ago.
In late 2008 I got an iPhone 3Gs. The device impressed the living hell out of me in comparison to other smartphones. iPad came out and the same thing happened; my first experience testing one made clear to me that this device was light years ahead of the other tablets I'd owned -- a Vadem Clio, a Fujitsu Stylistic, a Toshiba M200 -- in actual *usability* for general-purpose consumer information tasks.
So this summer I started playing with "hackintosh" OS X distros on a Thinkpad T60, even as my frustration with KDE4 (and the pending switch to Gnome Shell) grew to epic proportions. Within a few weeks it was clear I would eventually switch and the only question was when.
By September I'd become a Mac user with Linux installed on a drive (just because I'd somehow feel naked without Linux around somewhere) but not actually in use for day-day computing at all. With iTerm and Mac ports on Snow Leopard, I have a more stable and serious Unix feeling than I think I've had since the days of SunOS on a Sun 3/80 when I was a CS undergrad. It just feels right. It feels more Unix than Linux did in a surprising way, despite the odd filesystem layout and massive changes in things like the init system.
And the software purchasing ran downhill like a flood. I thought I was an OSS person, but within a month of switching I'd also bought Adobe CS5, Aperture, Office 2008/Mac, and iLife. And using these things seriously makes me regret the years spent coaxing every last bit of life out of GIMP, Gthumb, OpenOffice.org, and so on, not to mention the total absence of things like pervasive drag-and-drop from Linux environments.
Really, it amounts to growing up. I didn't realize how much productivity I lost to the ideological limitations of OSS platforms over the years (and I wrote a number of Linux and OSS books in the '90s and early '00s, so I'm no n00b) until the last few months with OS X.
The /. crowd may hate Apple, but if this were a three-way to-the-death between Microsoft, KDE/GNOME, and Apple, I'd be cheering for Apple all the way. They may be totalitarian, but their totalitarian world is damn near the utopian system that makes totalitarianism okay.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
kidding... It is really a nice interview to read. I am in a big company. There are tons of smart people. However, the company keeps going south. If the management team were as frank/honest as Sculley, we should have been better.
^(oo)^pig~
The interview basically goes like this:
Q: Is Jobs really that awesome?
A: Yes, Steve is so totally awesome. He's so awesome that his awesomeness is itself awesome. That's why all his projects are awesome. I'm an idiot, but even I can recognize that Steve is awesome. Isn't that awesome?
Q: No, but really, just that other thing Steve did - doesn't it show for real how awesome he is?
A: Totally, it's like it's all about awesomeness. Oh, also, Steve is perfect at anything he does. And so are his products. He's so unimaginably perfect that it's totally awesome. Oh, didn't I say everything he makes is awesome? Yeah!
...
I don't know why everyone on slashdot seems to give him a free pass but say DRM, locked-down hardware, restrictions, end user licenses and so on are bad.
Let's say DRM is awful, horrible. Then we as geeks who know best should be celebrating Apple, for they are the company who FORCED the record companies to give up DRM for audio, because they had the power to and it was easier on the user not to have to deal with DRM.
They can't do it for video, not yet, because the playing field is too wide - but it's not Apple's fault media companies dealing with video will not let go. And if they are ever to let go you can almost be sure it will be because somehow, Apple forced them to again. Perhaps even by Apple buying a failing studio or two.
As for the rest, Apple is just doing what the rest of the industry does in terms of lockdown and licenses. They start out more closed in some cases but in the end they are more open than most. I can write iPhone software in any language I choose now, when the practical reality is I have fewer language choices for Android. Any remotely technical user with a need to can jailbreak an iPhone, but there are shipping Android devices today you cannot root.
Apple is also the one I think with the proper model for security on the platform of the future - you ask the user at time of use of a protected resource, not up front. Android is more fine-grained at the moment but I think it's to the average users detriment, when they cannot possibly understand the implications of a security laundry list before they ever even use an application.
I am not giving Jobs a free pass, when Apple does something stupid I would call it out just as well as anyone (I complained right alongside those that said it was a mistake to disallow other languages). But the inverse of your statement is that Apple does not seem to get any CREDIT from those who should know to bestow it when they do something good for the computer industry as a whole.
The only reality distortion field I see is a bitter cloud of hatred that prevents some technically minded people from seeing anything good that Apple does, as good.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Wow, Steve looks like an absolute friggin fruitcake in that picture.
Nice suspenders, douche.
From the interview: "Microsoft’s philosophy is to get it out there and fix it later. Steve would never do that. He doesn’t get anything out there until it is perfected."
Riiiiight. {cough faulty IP4 antenna design, cracking screens}
Great post. I too was once part of the mindless "Apple is shiny and full of shit" brigade until I noticed that lots of smart people were starting to use Macs back in 2002-2003. Then I jumped in by buying an iBook G3 and haven't looked back since.
They're one of the few companies who actually give a shit about designing usable computing devices.
do you work for apple marketing campaign ? :) ;)
because this sounded way, way over the top, as if written by a professional pr person who doesn't know when to stop. i'd guess you are either from apple marketing team, or from some pr agency hired by them
Rich