April 10, 1985: During a fateful meeting, Apple CEO John Sculley threatens to resign unless the company’s board of directors removes Steve Jobs as executive VP and general manager of the Macintosh division.
This triggers a series of events that will ultimately result in Jobs’ exit. The marathon board meeting — which continued for several hours the next day — results in Jobs losing his operating role within the company, but being allowed to stay on as chairman. Things don’t exactly play out like that.
April 8, 1983: John Sculley, former president of PepsiCo, takes charge as Apple’s third CEO.
Despite a total lack of experience selling tech products, Sculley is lured to Apple by Steve Jobs himself. The Apple co-founder famously pitched the Pepsi exec with the line, “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”
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.
An incredibly rare Apple VideoPad 2 prototype is headed to auction after it was purchased from an Apple engineer back in 1999. It comes with a black leather carrying case that features the Newton logo, and is expected to fetch $12,000.
The VideoPad, which was scrapped by Steve Jobs upon his return to Apple in 1997, was a personal digital assistant (PDA) similar to the Newton that would have allowed users to carry out video calls. But it never made it to market.
Long before Tim Cook brought his operations wizardry to Apple, Del Yocam lent his logistical prowess to Cupertino. Apple’s first chief operating officer, he helped transform the company from a chaotic, scrappy startup into a streamlined manufacturing powerhouse.
He also served as an early mentor to Steve Jobs, the young Apple co-founder who sometimes seemed out of his depth in 1979.
“When I first got to know him, he was lost,” Yocam told Cult of Mac. “He was no longer involved in the Apple II and no one wanted him around, especially management. He didn’t care about money at that time. He was like an orphan, living away from home.”
In many ways, Yocam was the proto-Tim Cook, a manufacturing and operations specialist who helped transform a dysfunctional startup into a massive, moneymaking leader of the early PC industry. He also helped take the rapidly growing company international.
Yocam deserves more credit for helping build Apple than history has so far accorded him. He was one of the main players at a crucial point in Cupertino’s history.
Yocam, now 76, recently talked with Cult of Mac about Apple’s early days. In this exclusive interview, he discusses his friendship and working relationship with Jobs, Apple’s challenging, fascinating, and sometimes malodorous co-founder.
He also reveals new details about Jobs’ tearful ouster from Apple — and how Jobs later offered him an amazing job, only to revoke it at the last moment.
Former Apple CEO John Sculley agrees with Tim Cook that healthcare is a great area for Apple to move into. It may even, he suggests, “be the great legacy that [Cook is] talking about.”
Tim Cook recently made the comments about health in an interview with CNBC Mad Money host Jim Cramer. He said that health services may wind up being, “Apple’s greatest contribution to mankind.”
You probably don’t know the name Gerry Roche, but he was heavily involved in one of the most significant events in Apple history.
Roche, who died over the weekend at the age of 87, was the executive recruiter who brought John Sculley from PepsiCo to Apple in the early 1980s. Sculley wound up overseeing a massive boom in Apple’s business, the launch of the Macintosh, and — perhaps most memorably — the departure of Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs’ unmatched passion for Apple is what made him one of the world’s best recruiters, says former Apple CEO John Sculley.
The late Apple co-founder was notorious for his ability to organize a team of A players. According to Sculley, that’s because Jobs never let failure trip him up.
Among questions on his favorite sandwiches (“Cheeseburger, Cheeseburger, Cheeseburger”) and whether he can still jump over a chair (probably not), Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates got asked whether his company had copied Steve Jobs during a Reddit Q&A on Monday.
Gates denied copying Cupertino — but reminded everybody that Microsoft and Apple both borrowed liberally from another Silicon Valley pioneer.
Even a year on from its launch, former Apple CEO John Sculley isn’t convinced the Apple Watch is a must-have Apple device just yet.
“I think the Apple Watch is beautiful, but it doesn’t have enough utility to be something that I feel I have to have at this point in time,” he says in a new interview with The Street, noting that it’s the only major Apple product he doesn’t use.
John Sculley may be best known to a generation of Apple fans as the CEO who made the company choose between him and Steve Jobs. But he’s also a successful investor, mentor and entrepreneur — as well as the person who increased Apple’s sales from $800 million to $8 billion during his decade at the top.
In an interview with Cult of Mac, Sculley, who ran Apple from 1983 to 1993, tells why he doesn’t wear an Apple Watch, makes the case that AAPL stock is undervalued, explains how the Steve Jobs movie twisted facts, and talks about his new book Moonshot and the future of entrepreneurism.
There are plenty of opposing views about how Apple should handle the FBI’s demand to create a backdoor to unlock a dead terrorist’s iPhone.
One idea we haven’t heard before, however, is a concept put forward by former Apple CEO John Sculley: Cupertino could help provide the desired information, but Apple (not the government) could be in charge of reading the messages.
Former Apple CEO John Sculley says the new Steve Jobs movie is “extraordinary entertainment,” and thinks it will be “every bit as successful” as Aaron Sorkin’s previous Silicon Valley biopic The Social Network.
Like Andy Herzfeld, however, Sculley notes that the movie is not always accurate and that there, “was a lot of creative license taken.”
Steve Jobs is often portrayed as an egotistical tyrant in the books, movies, and documentaries that try to encapsulate the Apple CEO but according to someone who was both one of Jobs closest friends and a bitter rival, pop culture has totally blown it when it comes to portraying Steve.
Former Apple CEO John Sculley says he’s optimistic that the upcoming Steve Jobs movie written by Aaron Sorkin will fix some of his problems with how Jobs’ personality has been misrepresented.
Backed by ex-Apple CEO John Sculley, Obi Worldphone is a startup company that’s hoping to shake up the affordable Android market with two new devices that combine stylish designs and decent specifications with even more attractive price tags.
Meet the Obi Worldphone SF1 and SJ1.5, which start at as little as $129.
Former Apple CEO and business parter of Steve Jobs, John Sculley dropped some interesting new tidbits about Apple’s history in a recent interview. He said that all the way back in 1984, Jobs was dreaming up the idea of a “Mac phone.”
This “Mac phone” would be a desktop device that acted as a phone, but ran a version of the Mac’s software.
The first official trailer for the Steve Jobs movie we’ve all been waiting for is finally here. The one-minute clip gives us an early look at Michael Fassbender as Apple’s co-founder and former CEO, along with co-stars Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen and Jeff Daniels.
I’m a sucker for Apple history, and I particularly enjoy hearing from the people who had an impact on shaping Steve Jobs into the incredible force of nature that he became.
In a new interview with John Sculley, the former Apple CEO sheds some light on what may have been his single biggest lasting impact on Apple: the drive toward making the experience of using an Apple product one of the company’s most important focuses.
Sculley catches a lot of flack for being the CEO who kicked Jobs out of Apple back in 1985, but after Jobs and Tim Cook he was the best of CEO Apple ever had, and someone who’s always interesting to hear talk about Apple. In this particular video he shares his thoughts on the original Macintosh ad and why Apple trumps everyone else at marketing.
Former Apple CEO John Sculley has launched a new lineup of budget smartphones in the Middle East — although he admits Steve Jobs would like not be enamoured with them.
“Steve being Steve would say, you can do alot better,” he told Gulf Business.
The range includes various animal-themed devices, including the Octopus S520, the Falcon S451, Hornbill S551, Wolverine S501, and Obi F240. They are being launched by India’s Obi Mobile, a budget smartphone brand, which John Sculley co-founded.
Nearly three years after Steve Jobs’ death, Apple’s keynotes have become pale imitations of their former glory. The last major keynote — November’s introduction of the iPad Air and Retina mini — was a major international snoozefest.
Utterly devoid of excitement, it served only to stoke the pervasive rumors of Apple’s lack of innovation after Jobs (which aren’t true, but nonetheless).
Less than a decade ago, Apple was singled out by Greenpeace as one of the least environmentally-friendly tech companies on the planet.
Apple has since turned over a new leaf, embracing environmentalism as something every bit as central to the company as the latest iPhone.
Just how important became evident a few months ago, when, during a routine earnings call, Cook spoke of his dream for Apple as a “force for good in the world beyond our products.” The recent global celebrations for Earth Day for the first time in nearly a decade mean that his dream is closer to becoming a reality.
So what changed exactly?
“When I was at Apple from 1999 to 2005, sustainability was pretty much an afterthought,” says Abraham Farag, a former senior mechanical engineer of product design at Apple. Farag describes Apple’s approach to being green at the time as “lip service.”
Under Steve Jobs, Apple’s refusal to embrace sustainability came down to two principle factors: cost and design. For example, recycling plants wanted components which weighed over 25 grams to be marked with a special code so that they could be properly recycled. “But the marks were not pretty so Apple wouldn’t put them on,” Farag says. “Sustainability [organizations] want different materials to be attached in a method that was able to be separated later for recycling. No way we could alter the design for that consideration. Pure looks trumped any possible consideration for sustainability.”
Of the 16 mentions of the word “environment” that appear in Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography of Steve Jobs, all except one have to do with the environment (read: the mood and corporate ethos) inside technology companies. Jobs was a man who wanted to shape environments, not be shaped by the environment.
The same is true for the appearance of other words like “sustainability,” “green,” and other buzzwords that will likely appear time and again in the Tim Cook biography, when it is written. The only mention of the word “recycling” is in the context of an annoyance: a plane which flew overhead during Jobs’ famous Stanford commencement address, waving a banner which read “Recycle all e-waste” and threatening to distract listeners.
Apple’s environmental tussles reached their nadir in 2005, when the company got into a spat with Greenpeace International. Greenpeace slammed Apple for its use of toxic chemicals in the manufacturing process, and also for its lack of a recycling program. Jobs stood up for Apple’s environmental efforts at first — particularly when compared to competitors — but soon agreed that changes needed to be made. From mid-2006, Apple began phasing out CRTs and replacing them with LCD monitors, which met the European Union’s Restriction of Hazardous Substances in electronics, years before the EU deadline for compliance.
Apple additionally focused on lowering the power requirements of many of its products in general, which scored high Energy Star ratings, as well as gold ratings from the Electronic Product Environment Assessment Tool (EPEAT), which attempts to measure products’ environmental impact over their lifespans — taking into account energy use, recyclability, and the manufacturing process. Products were also redesigned with recycling in mind — seen by choices like the decision to switch from plastic to aluminum for Macs.
While Jobs got the lion’s share of the credit, behind the scenes two of the driving forces behind the “greening” of Apple were reportedly Tim Cook and Jony Ive. As both began to get more power within the company, Apple’s focus on sustainability grew.
What was key about Cook and Ive being sustainability advocates was their placement within Apple. Since both had considerable operating autonomy, they were able to get things done that predecessors with similar ideas had never been able to. For instance, while Abraham Farag was employed at Apple he recalls the company hiring a former colleague he had worked with at IDEO. She was brought on with the job title of program manager for Environmental Technologies and Strategies Group within R&D; charged with tracking environmental attributes for all new hardware projects.
There was just one problem, however: she was the only one doing this at the time.
“Imagine with everything Apple was doing they [only] had one person looking at the environmental impacts,” Farag says. “[There’s simply] no way one person could have much impact without very strong top-down support, which she didn’t get. She certainly tried, but it was an impossible task.”
Apple has embraced alternative energy source like solar power and hydroelectric power for its data centers.
With Cook and Ive now the two most powerful people at Apple, the focus on environmental factors has gained steam. In May 2013, Cook announced that Apple had hired the former Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, to serve as its top environmental adviser.
“Apple has shown how innovation can drive real progress by removing toxics from its products, incorporating renewable energy in its data center plans, and continually raising the bar for energy efficiency in the electronics industry,” Jackson said around the time she joined. “I look forward to helping support and promote these efforts, as well as leading new ones in the future aimed at protecting the environment.”
Cook has also sorted out the last of the major sticking points for Apple’s green credentials: its data centers, which saw Apple ranked dead last out of various tech companies in a 2011 Greenpeace report. Jump forward just a few years, and Apple has embraced alternative energy source like solar power and hydroelectric power for its data centers, as part of its pledge to use 100% renewable energy to power all of its facilities.
Similar sentiments are behind the decision for Apple’s $5.5 billion Cupertino “spaceship” headquarters to have 70% of its power provided on-site by photovoltaics and fuel cells, with the remaining power covered by sustainable “green sources” in California.
“This is a Tim Cook initiative,” says former Apple CEO John Sculley, speaking with Cult of Mac about Apple’s drive toward promoting sustainability as one of its primary goals. While Sculley notes that Jobs was responsible for a great many groundbreaking innovations, he has it on good authority that Cook is the one who has driven Apple’s embrace of sustainability.
“This is a Tim Cook initiative,” says former Apple CEO John Sculley.
The company’s green direction may look like a marketing stunt. After all, this is hardly an area that Apple is coming to early.
But it is something that Tim Cook feels strongly about. A cool and collected CEO with none of Jobs’ reputation for tantrums, Cook has lost his temper very few times publically while at the helm of Apple. One of those occasions came in March this year, however, when he was pushed by the conservative think tank National Center for Public Policy Research to disclose the cost of Apple’s sustainability programs.
Claiming that ethical decisions sometimes trump financial ones, Cook snapped that he didn’t “consider the bloody ROI” (return-on-investment) when it came to promoting sustainability. “If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock,” he said.
Cook has often sounded too much like a person impersonating Steve Jobs during his stint as CEO: saying the kinds of things Steve might say, but without Jobs’ charisma and ability to distort reality with his “gee whiz” boy inventor proclamations.
When Cook narrated Apple’s recent Earth Day commercial, though, it came across as Cook speaking about a subject he felt passionate about, that you couldn’t imagine coming out of Jobs’ mouth.
At the same time, the ad — and the overall vision for Apple — works because it makes total sense given the company’s ethos. Apple might only have embraced environmentalism lately, but its identity owes a great deal to organizations like the Whole Earth Catalog — the hippie-tech magazine Jobs mentioned during his Stanford commencement address. The phrase “Stay hungry, stay foolish” came from that magazine’s founder, Stewart Brand, who stayed in touch with Jobs his entire life.
Brand’s 1960s vision was for a combining of personal technology with the kind of back-to-nature thinking prevalent in counterculture circles. Jobs took many of the Whole Earth Catalog’s ideas, but instead of using them to refer to the literal ecosystem, he used them as metaphors for the kind of tech ecosystem Apple runs on today — where sales in the App Store, drive iPhone sales, which drive iPad sales, and so on.
Tim Cook’s vision for Apple as a green company brings Apple back in line with that ideology — minus the metaphor.
At a time when new earning reports coming out of Apple are spun as negatives once again by certain analysts (despite another record quarter), and the world is still awaiting the next breakthrough Apple innovation, Cook may have given it to us with Apple’s rethought approach to sustainability.
His belief in Apple as an environmental “force for good” speaks more of a man evolving what Apple stands for as a company — rather than continuing to rule over the kind of “haunted empire” Yukari Iwatani Kane described Apple as in her recent book.
It might not be an iWatch, but perhaps this will ultimately prove to be Tim Cook’s lasting legacy at Apple.
And, hey, it’s never bad when Apple gets to point out how it genuinely “thinks different” to competitors like Samsung.
The greening of Apple: it took almost 10 years for the Cupertino company to turn around its dismal eco-scorecard.
But that worm has truly turned: in this week’s edition of Cult of Mac Magazine, author Luke Dormehl talks to former Apple exec John Sculley and other insiders about why this change is all about current Apple CEO Tim Cook. Apple’s green day means a better future and even better products, they say.
Also this week, we’ve got reviews editor Charlie Sorrel taking a deep dive into underwater iPhoneography, plus his reviews for the best in Apple-related paraphernalia — including a mullet-style notebook (you know: business up front, party in the back.) Our tastemaker Buster Hein has once again sifted through all the offerings in the iTunes store to serve up the most scrumptious offerings in music, books and movies and Evan Killham rounds up what you need in apps.
Apple isn’t being valued as a creative leap company so much as it is a predictable cash machine, says former CEO John Sculley.
Speaking with India’s Economic Times about the launch of his latest venture, pCell — a technology that allows huge amounts of data to travel on spectrum-crunched wireless networks, while offering faster speeds and fewer call drops to customers — Sculley gave his opinion of Apple’s current situation:
“Google and Apple are like ATMs, they just keep generating cash. Google takes more risk than Apple. Apple tends to stay the course, and this year is a very big year for Apple in terms of products. It’s not clear that they’re going to demonstrate a creative leap this year despite the products, like they did when Steve Jobs was leader. I think it’s probably unfair to expect them to have a creative leap every five years.”
Former Apple CEO John Sculley is one of the principal investors behind a new smartphone brand set to launch in India.
The as-yet-unnamed brand is being funded by the investment and acquisition company, Inflexionpoint, for which Sculley serves as a founding partner.
The brand is set to be led by Ajay Sharma, who was previously head of HTC’s India operation. The company will launch a series of smartphones, which will debut in April this year.
Former Apple CEO John Sculley has confirmed that he and a group of investors were lining up a bid for BlackBerry, but they waited too long and lost out. In an interview on Bloomberg Surveillance, Sculley reveals how he was surprised when the struggling smartphone maker announced a $1 billion investment deal earlier this week.