I've run into John Sculley and shot the breeze with him whenever I've attended my favourite conference, PopTech, in Camden, Maine. Sculley has a fabulous place there just down the street from the opera house that is PopTech's home. I was a tech reporter back then, back in the days when the Internet was all new (I was an AOL member when it had less than 5,000 members, so there) and ebay and Amazon.com had yet to be invented.
One of the companies that fascinated me then — and still does — is Apple. Sculley was Apple's CEO for a decade or so in the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. He'd come to Apple from Pepsi where he had great success marketing the hell out of Pepsi and stealing Coke's market share and Apple's board wanted him to do the same thing with computers.
In this fabulously interesting interview, Sculley admits that he didn't know a thing about computers — one reason why he made the near-disastrous decision to stick with Motorola processor rather than Intel's x86 processor in the 1990s — and he talks a lot about Steve Jobs and how Jobs apparently doesn't talk to Sculley anymore.
Jobs was Apple's largest single shareholder when Sculley got hired as CEO but, though Jobs wanted to be CEO, the Apple board of directors picked Sculley instead.
Sculley would eventually get fired by Apple's board. Wikipedia has this verdict on Sculley's tenure at Apple:
“Sculley increased Apple's sales from $800 million to $8 billion. However, his stint at Apple remains controversial due to his departure from founder Steve Jobs's sales structure, particularly regarding his decision to compete with IBM in selling computers to the same types of customers. He was ultimately forced out of Apple in 1993 as the company's margins eroded, sales diminished and stock declined”
Two CEOs later, Jobs came back (I think the stock was around $13 then and is now about to hit or has hit $300), rescued the company, and the rest is history.
Apple, obviously, is Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs is Apple. But Sculley (pictured above next to a very young Jobs) was there for some important moments in Apple's history — the development of AppleTalk and of QuickTime, for instance — and, if you're at all a geek, this interview is an absolutely fascinating must-read.