John Sculley On Steve Jobs, The Full Interview Transcript

Steve Jobs and John Sculley, the former CEO of Apple. The pair were dubbed the "dynamic duo."

Here’s a full transcript of the interview with John Sculley on the subject of Steve Jobs.

It’s long but worth reading because there are some awesome insights into how Jobs does things.

It’s also one of the frankest CEO interviews you’ll ever read. Sculley talks openly about Jobs and Apple, admits it was a mistake to hire him to run the company and that he knows little about computers. It’s rare for anyone, never mind a big-time CEO, to make such frank assessment of their career in public.

UPDATE: Here’s an audio version of the entire interview made by reader Rick Mansfield using OS X’s text-to-speech system. It’s a bit robotic (Rick used the “Alex” voice, which he says is “more than tolerable to listen to”) but you might enjoy it while commuting or at the gym. The audio is 52 minutes long and it’s a 45MB download. It’s in .m4a format, which will play on any iPod/iPhone, etc. Download it here (Option-Click the link; or right-click and choose “Save Linked File…”).

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Why the Mac Team Could Have No More Than 100 People [Sculley Interview]

It seems a little nutty, but Steve Jobs deemed that the team developing the original Macintosh couldn’t exceed more than 100 people. Here’s why.

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Steve Jobs’ Sony Envy [Sculley Interview]

What did Steve Jobs do when Sony founder Akio Morito do gave him one of the first Sony Walkmans off the production line?

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Why It Would Have Been Impossible to License the Mac [Sculley Interview]

Exploded Mac: the Poster

It’s commonly believed that Apple wouldn’t have nearly gone out of business if it had only licensed the Mac operting system to other computer makers, like Microsoft did. But John Sculley explains why that was impossible:

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Steve Jobs’ Other Brilliant 80s Invention That No One Talks About [Sculley Interview]

With the invention of the Macintosh in 1984, Steve Jobs commercialized modern graphical computing. But he oversaw another invention from that era that was just as brilliant but no one mentions these days.

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Apple’s Big Mistake Was Hiring Me As CEO [Sculley Interview]

There’s a great scene at the end of Bridge on the River Kwai when Alec Guinness’ character assess his career in the British Army and admits it’s been a disappointment. Ex-Apple CEO John Sculley takes a similar look at his stint at the top of Apple, and says the company made a big mistake when it hired him as CEO. It’s the most surprisingly frank admission I’ve ever heard anyone make about their career.

Here’s what he said:

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How the Newton Saved Apple From Going Bankrupt [Sculley Interview]

One of the first things Steve Jobs did on his return to Apple was kill the Newton, the brick-sized messagepad that some blame for dragging the company towards bankruptcy. But John Sculley argues that the Newton actually prevented Apple from going out of business.

Here’s why:

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Steve Jobs Doesn’t Invent Products, He Discovers Them [Sculley Interview]

When Steve Jobs went to visit Dr. Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, the two inventors agreed that products aren’t invented — they are discovered.

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How Jobs Modeled Apple on Italian Car Companies, Not Other PC Makers [Sculley Interview]

Back in the 80s, Apple was modeled not on other PC companies, but Italina auto makers.

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At Apple, Even Software Code Has To Be Beautiful [Sculley Interview]

John Sculley:

Engineers are far more important than managers at Apple — and designers are at the top of the hierarchy. Even when you look at software, the best designers like Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Capps, were called software designers, not software engineers because they were designing in software. It wasn’t just that their code worked. It had to be beautiful code. People would go in and admire it. It’s like a writer. People would look at someone’s style. They would look at their code writing style and they were considered just beautiful geniuses at the way they wrote code or the way they designed hardware.