Ex-Apple CEO John Sculley Dishes On Steve Jobs 417
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."
Re:Not exactly a revelation (Score:5, Informative)
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:Level of Perfection (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Incorrect details (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Control (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Control (Score:5, Informative)
Ever since Ubuntu came out, I've never had to recompile a kernel or find device drivers myself. I can still view any media I want, have a bash shell, and have a unix-like OS. I was amazed at how the Ubuntu installation found all drivers (even wireless!) for my wife's HP laptop with a Broadcom wireless chip (and that was 3 years ago on a fairly new laptop).
Re:Not exactly a revelation (Score:3, Informative)
As much as I don't like Apple, you're comparing the wrong things. You can also install whatever you want on the Apple computers you buy. You can even install Windows on the Mac now.
With the new Windows Phone 7 phones, there's probably going to be an app store and no sideloading, just like the iPhone. And because of that I have an Android phone instead.
Re:Control (Score:3, Informative)
When Apple started selling certified UNIX, that's when.