John Sculley Speaks Out About Ousting Steve Jobs (Video)
Sep 10, 2013 20:06
Is it a tad bit late for John Sculley to start talking about Steve Jobs? He ran Apple for 10 years, but he's more commonly known as the guy that fired Steve Jobs from Apple.
But according to Sculley, that's not exactly what happened. He said this on Thursday in Bali, Indonesia at the annual Forbes Global CEO Conference.
"I was hired to be Steve's partner," he said. "I had no interest in taking over his company."
Apple had failed with Lisa and with the Apple 3 and needed cash to develop the Mac, which wasn't projected to be profitable for years.
Sculley and Jobs were "great" personal friends before they clashed and "when the Macintosh Office, the next version of the Mac introduced in 1985, failed, Steve went into a deep depression over it. And it really wasn't his fault. It was all about Moore's Law ... the reality was the Mac Office wasn't powerful enough. It just couldn't do very much. It was being called a toy and ridiculed in the market," Sculley said.
Sculley's vision didn't align with Jobs as they wanted to do two separate things. Jobs wanted to drop the price and do more advertising while Sculley thought that would just make the company lose more money.
The board assigned the third co founder of Apple, Mike Markkula, to help make the decision and to research both sides and Markkula agreed with Sculley.
The board simply told Jobs to stop running the Macintosh division. He wasn't fired. He was still the chairman. Also, he was the largest shareholder.
Jobs felt betrayed and he left Apple.
"I really blame the board," Sculley said. "I think the board understood Apple at the time and understood Steve. I think there could have been a solution to keep me and Steve working together" he said.