In a recent interview with the BBC, former Apple CEO John Sculley disclosed quite a few juicy details about his involvement with Apple, and his badly interpreted relationship with the late Steve Jobs. He also gave interviewers a piece of his mind about television.
On his relationship with Jobs, Sculley
said, “It's ironic that neither Steve Jobs nor I have read the [Steve Jobs biography] but I've seen interviews that Walter Isaacson has given and they seem to be very credible.”
“I think he captured Steve in the really good greatness of him, and from what I've heard from people who have read the book Walter Isaacson cleared up some of the myths - that I never really did fire Steve Jobs and that Apple was actually a very profitable company,” he said.
As Apple fans should know, an internal power struggle in the ‘80s ended with Steve Jobs leaving Apple, as the company’s board of directors had sided with Sculley, then Apple CEO, on matters of cutting costs.
As it turned out, Jobs had been right all along, and this is a fact that Sculley has always admitted, as he did in this very interview with the BBC.
“Ironically it was all about Moore's law and it wasn't about Steve and me. Computers just weren't powerful enough in 1985 to do the very rigorous graphics that you had to be able to do for laser printing, and ironically it was only 18 months later when computers were powerful enough that we renamed the Mac Office, Desktop Publishing and it became wildly successful."
"It wasn't my idea, it was all Steve's stuff, but he was just a year and a half too early.”
On the TV subject in particular, Sculley confidently opined that Apple would single handedly revolutionize the TV industry sooner or later, just as it did with all other industries.
“I think that Apple has revolutionized every other consumer industry, why not television?”, Sculley remarked. “I think that televisions are unnecessarily complex. The irony is that as the pictures get better and the choice of content gets broader, that the complexity of the experience of using the television gets more and more complicated.”
Apple is rumored to be designing (or already building) a revolutionary television product that uses Siri as the remote control system. Siri is the voice activated personal assistant introduced with the iPhone 4S last October.
“So it seems exactly the sort of problem that if anyone is going to change the experience of what the first principles are, it is going to be Apple,” he said.
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