Former Apple chief John Sculley says Steve Jobs 'never forgave him' John Sculley, former Apple chief and forever famous for pushing Steve Jobs out of the company in the '80s, has said that the pair of tech entrepreneurs never patched things up between them. “We never really talked… Steve Jobs never forgave me – Apple was his baby,” Sculley admitted at the Web Summit in Dublin. He said that …
Unfortunately for Sculley he is forever tarred with the brush of "the man who fired Steve Jobs because he thought Macintosh would go nowhere", as you say, which is not quite right. What he did do was to turn Apple into a profitable corporation (it was Spindler and Amelio who oversaw running the company into the ground) as well as removing the 'cult of Steve'. Admittedly Sculley does try to claim that firing Jobs created NeXT/Pixar ergo sum Sculley created the new Apple (he even once tried to claim responsibility for the www since some of the work was done on NeXT computers).
As for his new business, Obi phones are made in China and retailed into India - why should the Irish give him taxbreaks?
Oh wait, Apple also have offices in Ireland ...
As far as I can tell, he's not saying he would locate in Ireland, but rather if he had a global business that was looking for a headquarters, then the choice would be between Ireland and Singapore.
In Scully's own words, he felt his biggest mistake was not that he fired Jobs, but rather in directing Apple to transition to Motorola/IBM's PowerPC RISC architecture, rather than spending the same effort to adopt Intel's CPUs instead. In hindsight, and considering that Apple eventually moved to Intel ten years later, it's probably true, but at the time, I remember everyone saying that RISC was the future, and Apple was going to speed ahead of Microsoft by jumping early. As we know, Windows 95, the explosion of commodity PC chipset suppliers, and the poor performance of Apple's emulated 68k software on PPC gave the lie to those predictions, but at the time you could see why Scully made the decision he did.
I think Scully was right to fire Jobs. Yes, the Macintosh became a success, but it was a Macintosh line whose development spending was under strict control of Scully. Had Jobs been still in charge, I do feel that the product's costs would have spiralled out of control in a search for an impossible "perfection" just like Lisa had.
http://www.folklore.org is a great site for the inside story of Apple during the first Jobs reign. You get a feel for a Jobs who was admired and feared by those he worked for, but also a man whose ambition was not yet tempered by failure. By firing Jobs, Scully could take some credit for Apple's later success when Jobs was hired back by the underrated Gil Amelio.
After Scully, Spindler did nothing to address the reality: that the WinTel duopoly driving down prices was killing Apple's business while the company's R&D was draining away into a hole named Copland, whose ship date was slipping by about 5 weeks every month. Amelio shored up the holes, killed the money-pit projects, and chose to bring in the only person who could herd the various gangs of cats that actually did things at Apple, and that person was... Jean-Louis Gass—no, it was Jobs, of course. (Although we all thought Gassée's BeOS, not NeXTStep was going to be the shoo-in as the replacement for Copland).
(Still, Amelio's description of standing on the bridge of a crashing supertanker where the captain's wheel does nothing is a perfect summary of how bad Apple's internal management structures were - although I shouldn't complain too much, as I was hired at this time as part of a major group expansion that was done without the knowledge of anyone outside the building)
In his first stint in charge, Jobs had always spoken of a mythical factory where "sand goes in one end, and computers come out the other", but it says a lot about his later, more mature, approach that Jobs's most successful products, iPod and iPhone, were outsourced as much as was possible. Do what you're good at; leave others to do what they're good at.
PowerPC was definitely the right choice at the time: the better architecture meant that especially the mobile products were significantly better than their Intel counterparts. It was only later with Motorola struggling that problems occurred - IBM wasn't interested or equipped for the volume. And, of course, it was things like Altivec in the PowerPC that made Intel raise its game. Just like AMD's 64-bit extensions instead of Itanium inside.
Apple actually have a pretty significant presence in Cork in Ireland. It's not a really what you'd call a 'brass plate' office, there are over 4000 staff there and it's been present there since 1982, before the Mac.
One thing that people forget too is that Apple's been present in Ireland through all sorts of phases of its business. It's been in Cork for 32 year and during periods when it was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy in the 1990s. It hasn't always been super-profitable.
The problem with the tax situation is two-fold:
Tax-breaks alone are generally not worth it as they do not encourage long term investments and, therefore, often cost more than they generate. Companies often leave as soon as the deal runs out or someone makes them a better offer.
To keep companies long-term you need a well-educated workforce with good productivity.
If it was only the tax-breaks in Ireland then it wouldn't be such an issue. But the ability to combine them with other loopholes in other countries in the EU, while perfectly legal, unfairly benefits the corporations. I say unfair but it is usually perfectly legal.
Q: Did Steve Jobs every forgive HIMSELF for hiring John Sculley?
A: If Jobs never forgave Sculley, then apparently NO.
The lesson:
Never, ever let marketing executives (aka John Sculleys) run your company if you want your company to be CREATIVE. Marketing-As-Management is death to any company that ever hopes to create anything new ever again. - Witness Kodak. - Witness Sony at this very moment.
What's the problem? Relational personalities (aka marketing folks) never tolerate Productive personalities. They'd rather kill them than suffer them to live. If you're bent on invention, innovation and bulldozing positive change at your company, the Marketing executives have a target on your back. It's one of the saddest and most discordant songs in history.
@DerekCurrie
<sarcasm>
Wow!! You mean it's really as simple as that? Thank you so much from enlightening me!!
I will ignore completely all the much more nuanced and factual stuff from Kristian Walsh a few comments above, especially seeing as it's from somebody who worked there at the relevant times.
</sarcasm>
Have a downvote, you numpty.
Just to clarify: I wasn't working at Apple in the Jobs/Scully era, and I wasn't in California - I'm too young and too Irish for that. All of those stories are other people's, and you can read them at the folklore.org site if you've an interest in the PC boom times of the 1980s or Apple in particular.
I did experience the slow death-spiral of Apple of the 1990s, the return of Steve Jobs, and the effect that it had on the company, and in my particular case, the in-sourcing of all tech jobs to Cupertino that resulted in what a friend had already described as "being made offer I could most definitely refuse".
I'd also note that the Apple that was dying on its feet was actually a fun place to work; and unlike today's industry-dominating behemoth, when you went home after work, you weren't still at the beck and call of sleep-deprived stress junkie in Cupertino who's forgotten what timezones are.
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