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."

Comments

Control

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Control

[JackieBrown]

I don't know why everyone on slashdot seems to give him a free pass

I don't know what comment threshold you browse at to think that EVERYONE (or even close to that) gives Jobs a free pass.

Re:Control

[onionman]

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.

Not really feasible for a 10 year old kid who is just starting to learn programming.

I think the reason that Apple is so celebrated here is that OS X provides what many long-time Linux users/developers have wanted: a highly functioning unix-like system under the hood with a nice polished user interface.

I do all of my "real work" on Linux systems, but my desktop and laptop are Macs because for most needs, it just works and I get a full bash shell and unix OS when needed. Yes, I pay a premium for that shiny hardware, but for me it's worth it not to have to deal with finding device drivers or re-compiling kernels, and it's nice to be able to view all forms of media, too.

Don't get me wrong. I still believe that Apple's DRM is evil and I wish that ever format was open and non-proprietary. I used to fight that fight when I was younger. But, now that I'm old, working full time, and have a family, I just don't have any energy left to get into fights with my desktop OS just to get some Dora The Explorer video to play for my kids.

Re:Control

[DrgnDancer]

If anything OSX is more open than Windows; the guts are open source (Darwin). It's just higher levels that are closed. On top of that Apple uses and contributes to a number of F/OSS projects to provide things like printing (CUPS), remote file system access (SAMBA), remote shell access (OpenSSH) and lots of others. I'd venture to say that more than 50% of of OSX is F/OSS code and Apple has generally been quite good about working with the projects they use. Apparently there's been some friction with the FSF a few times, but given that Stallman and Jobs are like oil and water...

Say what you want about the closed nature of the iDevices (and personally I like my iPhone, but think the iPad might be to limited ), but the Mac itself is way more open than Windows. It also represents, as another poster pointed out, what I've always really wanted. A reliable, Unix based, workstation with a good user interface, decent library of available commercial software, and capability to use pretty much all the F/OSS stuff I need.

If you want to see what Linux on the Desktop should look like, look no further than OSX. Not the design per se, though I like it well enough, but the way the OS works from a user point of view. In OSX you have a consumer OS. You never, ever have to go to the command line. You do anything you need to configure the computer in any way you need from simple easy to understand GUI tools. You can run all your software without hiccups, dependency issues, or driver headaches. BUT if you want to, and you know how to, you can quickly and easily open a command prompt, use the all the standard Unix tools, script to your heart's content, even install a Linux style package manager and use all the tools available to any of the free *nixes.

Re:Control

[oudzeeman]

I remember working on a kernel extension for OS X on a previous job 5 or 6 years ago. We were having some trouble, so we started digging through the XNU source code. We found an email address of an engineer at apple in some of the comments and emailed him. After a few emails it was determined there was a bug (we were doing something rather strange, so this wouldn't normally affect developers), he offered a work around and opened a bug report for the issue. This wouldn't have happened had I been developing for windows.

Not exactly a revelation

[elrous0]

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?

Re:Not exactly a revelation

[spiffmastercow]

It's because of two things.. 1.) It's Unix. All geeks worth their 2 ft. long beards love Unix. and 2.) geeks appreciate good design, even if they believe that sort of work is beneath them.

Re:Not exactly a revelation

[grub]

Obviously Apple isn't "all about hiring designers and marketers". All the designers in the world can't create a working product. That still takes engineers, programmers, etc.

What Apple does is come up with a nice design and have the technical people make it real. Most other companies have the techs make a product then have designers spray perfume on it.

Re:Not exactly a revelation

[elrous0]

Thousands of smart geeks typing on thousands of typewriters for an infinite amount of time

I think you just succinctly described /.

Re:Not exactly a revelation

[molnarcs]

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?

Well, there is more to the interview than that, although I'd say yours is a fair summary. Still, I'd recommend everyone RTFA, it's an interesting, deeply personal account of the way Jobs works, and the reasons for Apple's phenomenal success. It is even more interesting how Jobs has changed in the past few years compared to Scully's account. One point that stands out in this interview is Jobs rejection of looking at anything the competition does, or others do in general. Yes, he had his own heroes like Akio Morita and SONY, but generally he was far less obsessed with what others do than today.

His attack on Android in the latest quarterly earnings press conference was positively hysteric:

"We think Android is very, very fragmented"

"We think integrated will trump fragmented"

"... we will triumph over Google's fragmented approach"

"...where PCs have the same interface, Android is very fragmented

The new bogeyman: fragmented FRAGMENTED FRAGMENTED!!!

There's a nice spin in there. At any given time, all important apps will be present in all markets (or at least the top three markets). What really happens here is that markets are actually forced to compete with each other a) for developers b) for users (markets that would demand exclusivity would simply die, even if anyone was stupid enough to pull something like that). This is good news for everyone, and the antithesis of everything Apple stands for. No matter how much he SJ tries to spin it, fragmentation is not a problem. Here's another real jam, the app itself (TweetDeck) was discussed earlier here on Slashdot.

"Twitter client, Twitter Deck [sic], recently launched their app for Android. They reported that they had to contend with more than 100 different versions of Android software on 244 different handsets. The multiple hardware and software iterations present developers a daunting challenge." Steve Jobs

Here is what the developers had to say about Jobs' remark:

Did we at any point say it was a nightmare developing for Android? Errr nope, no we didn't. It wasn't."

Indeed I recall reading their blog post about this, and the tone was more along the lines of "look how cool it is that TweetDeck runs on the craziest, wackiest combinations of ROMS and hardware. Looking at the list, it's amazing indeed (10 NOKIA N900, and even a few iPhone 3GS ... wtf?).

Re:Not exactly a revelation

[BasilBrush]

What I find interesting is that his followers are materialistic, light-handed, lazy, status-obsessed pricks.

Ah, the whine of someone who can't afford something.

I couldn't give a damn about status or materialism. I don't buy designer labels or expensive watches, and don't even own a car any more. But when it comes to computing, I want the best tool for the job, and because I haven't been lazy, I can afford it. For about 7 years now, that's meant buying Apple.

Re:Not exactly a revelation

[Anonymous Coward]

I think a large amount of confusion here is the use of the word "Design." Design is mistakenly interpreted by some as the way something looks. Design is actually the way something WORKS (as well as looks). How I interact with a tool can be as important as how well it works.

If you had 2 hammers, one with a rubberized grip on the handle, and another with metal spikes on the handle, I'd choose the rubberized one because it's more comfortable for me to use, even though both can drive a nail effectively. I'll respect everyone's intelligence enough to not continue the metaphor - but you get the idea. When Apple talks about design, they are not talking about making something that looks good and works terrible, they are talking about something that is thoughtful, inside and out.

I would say that Dell actually does more 'flashy" designs designed to catch the eye, but on the inside, it's still the same old rotten crap.

Incorrect details

[Alioth]

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.