Apple’s former CEO, John Sculley talks about Apple’s ability to revolutionize the television industry. He also shares his thoughts about Apple in his days and now.
Apple’s former CEO, John Sculley, talked about the capability of Apple and its ability to revolutionize the television industry. John Sculley was the CEO of Apple for 10 years from 1983 to 1993. And Steve jobs chose him as the CEO in 1983, by asking him if he wants to spend the rest of his life selling sugar water, of join him and change the world. And Sculley accepted to take charge as CEO almost immediately. As days went by, they got closer to each other and their relationship got more intense. But after the launch of the Macintosh, Steve was fired due to various reasons, as he has mentioned in his Biography.
Having said this, years later, Sculley has shared something which is really interesting. Here’s the excerpt of the Sculley from a recent interview with BBC.
I think that Apple has revolutionized every other consumer industry, why not television? I think that televisions are unnecessarily complex. The irony is that as the pictures get better and the choice of content gets broader, that the complexity of the experience of using the television gets more and more complicated. So it seems exactly the sort of problem that if anyone is going to change the experience of what the first principles are, it is going to be Apple.
Adding more to this, he also shared why Jobs was fired and who really fired him from his own company, Apple:
When the Macintosh Office was introduced in 1985 and failed Steve went into a very deep funk. He was depressed, and he and I had a major disagreement where he wanted to cut the price of the Macintosh and I wanted to focus on the Apple II because we were a public company. […] Ironically it was all about Moore’s law and it wasn’t about Steve and me. Computers just weren’t powerful enough in 1985 to do the very rigorous graphics that you had to be able to do for laser printing, and ironically it was only 18 months later when computers were powerful enough that we renamed the Mac Office, Desktop Publishing and it became wildly successful. It wasn’t my idea, it was all Steve’s stuff, but he was just a year and a half too early.
As far as I see, Sculley is still attached to the company and now serving as a Silicon Valley Investor.