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.
He meant himself: Sculley admits it was a mistake to hire Sculley to run the company.
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
So what the hell happened with System 7 and then OS 8? So much for "perfection."
When he came back to Apple in '97, he put OS Classic on death row, but he had to keep it alive because it would take six years to develop a stable, workable version of OS X out of NeXT's OS and there were no alternatives to bridge those years and there was a bunch of software to support.
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.
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.
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
...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.
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.
I get the impression that "dish" is now used as the opposite of "diss" in the gossip media, since it fits easily into headlines. So, if someone "dishes" on someone else, it's supposed to be a good thing.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Hum, english is not my native language so I might have missed that detail.
Nonetheless I was in doubt so before I posted I checked it (from http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/dish+on):
dish on someone
Sl. to gossip about or slander someone. e.g., Stop dishing on her. She never hurt you! They spent an hour dishing on Wally.
I'll keep that in mind in the future, thanks.
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
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}