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Sculley, the Mac Crisis & the Exile: When Apple Pushed Jobs Out
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Steve Jobs hand-picked John Sculley to run Apple — then watched as their partnership collapsed and the board stripped him of power. This is the chapter that defines the exile that would reshape Silicon Valley forever.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
It's nineteen eighty-three. John Sculley is sitting across from Steve Jobs, and he's about to turn him down.
To understand why Jobs wanted Sculley, you have to understand where Apple stood in nineteen eighty-three. The company had grown from a garage operation into a public company worth hundreds of millions.
Before Sculley arrived, Jobs had already placed two large bets. The first was the Lisa, launched in January of nineteen eighty-three.
Through nineteen eighty-four and into eighty-five, the relationship between Jobs and Sculley deteriorated in stages. At first it had looked like a genuine partnership.
What happened next depends on who you ask. Jobs himself gave different accounts over the years.
It's worth being fair to Sculley here, because the story is often told as simple villain-and-genius. The reality is more mixed.
By the early nineteen nineties, something had shifted at Apple that was harder to define than any single product failure. The company had lost its sense of direction.
The Sculley gamble is one of the most analyzed decisions in business history, and the analysis usually focuses on what Apple lost when Jobs left. That's not wrong.
That famous question, the one Jobs asked Sculley in New York, is worth returning to now. Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life?
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