Tag: Sculley

April 6, 1939: John Sculley is born in New York City. He will grow up to be hailed as a business and marketing genius, eventually overseeing Apple’s transformation into the most profitable personal computer company in the world.

After a remarkable stint as president of Pepsi-Cola, Sculley will take over as Apple’s third CEO in 1983. He runs Apple for a 10-year period, guiding the creation of the revolutionary Newton MessagePad.

During Sculley’s decade at the helm, Apple sells more personal computers than any other company. But most people still remember him for his role in kicking Steve Jobs out of Cupertino.

John Sculley: Apple’s third CEO

Before his decade at Apple, Sculley lacked any background in selling tech products. Still, Jobs lured Sculley to Apple from Pepsi with one of the most famous lines in business: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”

Jobs did not technically run Apple as CEO until he returned to Cupertino in the late 1990s. During the early ’80s, the idea was that Jobs and Sculley would helm the company together like co-CEOs. Jobs and Apple’s engineers would take care of the cutting-edge technology, while Sculley would use his marketing expertise to legitimize Apple.

Unfortunately, this arrangement did not last long. Jobs got squeezed out of Apple after a failed boardroom coup. He went on to found NeXT, a computer company that Apple eventually acquired.

Sculley, meanwhile, resigned as Apple CEO in 1993, having increased the company’s sales from $800 million to $8 billion. During this period, the Apple II and Macintosh computers became Apple’s biggest sellers, with the latter gradually overtaking the former.

MessagePads and Knowledge Navigators

“One of the issues that got me fired was that there was a split inside the company as to what the company ought to do,” Sculley told Cult of Mac in a wide-ranging interview in 2010.

“There was one contingent that wanted Apple to be more of a business computer company,” Sculley said. “They wanted to open up the architecture and license it. There was another contingent, which I was a part of, that wanted to take the Apple methodology — the user experience and stuff like that — and move into the next generation of products, like the Newton.”

While at Apple, Sculley sometimes got painted as an operations-minded outsider who lacked the world-changing vision of someone like Jobs. Sculley will be the first person to tell you he didn’t measure up to Jobs in this capacity. However, he oversaw some amazing R&D projects during his time as Apple CEO.

One of these was the Newton. Often regarded as Sculley’s answer to the Mac, it represented his first attempt at launching a game-changing new product line during his tenure as Apple CEO.

“It was Sculley’s Macintosh,” Frank O’Mahoney, one of the Apple marketing managers who worked on the Newton, told me when I interviewed him for my book The Apple Revolution. “It was Sculley’s opportunity to do what Steve had done, but in his own category of product.”

John Sculley and Newton: A futuristic ‘failure’

The Newton failed to take off immediately. But the concept for such a mobile device formed the basis for the iPhone, which now represents the bulk of Apple’s revenues. Sculley also commissioned an R&D project called the Knowledge Navigator — which predicted the arrival of tools like Siri and the iPad, almost down to the exact month.

After resigning as CEO, Sculley stayed at Apple as chairman until 1995, when he left the company completely. Today he remains in tech as an investor, particularly interested in smartphones for developing markets.

What did you think of Sculley as Apple CEO? Leave your comments below.