Now Playing
Sculley, Clones & the Long Slide: Apple's Lost Decade Without Jobs
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
After Steve Jobs was forced out, Apple didn't collapse overnight — it drifted, one reasonable-seeming decision at a time, until it was weeks from bankruptcy. This is the inside story of Apple's lost decade: the clone disaster, the Newton debacle, and the revolving door of CEOs who couldn't replace a founder.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
By nineteen eighty-five, Apple was one of the most talked-about technology companies in the world. By nineteen ninety-six, it was weeks away from bankruptcy.
John Sculley wasn't an incompetent leader. That's worth stating clearly, because the story of Apple's decline under his watch is sometimes told as if he were simply in over his head.
Through the late nineteen eighties and into the nineties, Apple released products. Plenty of them.
By nineteen ninety-three, the board had seen enough. Sculley was pushed out in June of that year, replaced by Michael Spindler, a German-born executive who'd been running Apple Europe.
This is where the technical story and the business story converge in a way that's hard to overstate. The Mac operating system, the software that ran every Macintosh computer, was aging badly.
Before we get to what that acquisition meant, it's worth pausing on the clone program. Because it illustrates something important about what Apple had become during this period.
The NeXT deal closed in December of nineteen ninety-six. Apple paid four hundred and twenty-nine million dollars.
In August of nineteen ninety-seven, at the Macworld Boston Expo, Jobs announced that Microsoft would invest one hundred and fifty million dollars in Apple. Microsoft would continue developing Office for the Mac for at least five years.
Apple's decade without Jobs teaches something that goes beyond one company's near-death experience. The drift wasn't caused by bad intentions.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.