“The year is 1985 and Steve Jobs is in trouble, after hiring Sculley as new CEO of Apple he began to enter a struggle over power in an attempt to regain control over his beloved Apple. In a move that was strange to Jobs he was banished to the distant office known as ‘Siberia’ and it didn’t take long before he left,” Alex writes for World of Apple. “$7 million and seven employees later Steve Jobs had a new interest, NeXT Computer. They originally worked on PostScript like technologies, working closely with Adobe but they soon found direction. It didn’t take long before Apple targeted a lawsuit at NeXT and in January of 1986 it was agreed that NeXT would be restricted to the workstation market.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews reader “Hugh” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Note: Jobs brought with him many NeXT executives, who replaced their Apple counterparts. In effect, NeXT was paid to take over Apple while keeping the Apple name.
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Hard to believe it was nine years ago.
– Mark
Hard to believe that a guy who spent years selling sugar water wasn’t smart enough to listen to Jobs and keep him around!
whatever happen to sculley, Is he still alive, what does he do now. Not trying to be funny, just want to know. If anyone knows please tell.
Cool!!
Apple has been on upward climb ever since.
He’s a top executive somewhere and uses a PC laptop, what a loser…
I was at the MacWorld where Steve was introduced, think Woz was also in attendence…. 9 months later I was at MacWorld Boston when he became iCEO. The NeXT announcement was a shock because everyone thought they were going to buy BeOS but the french guy (forget his name) wanted too much money… wow thank god he wanted too much money, we needed Steve back in charge.
…., Look here, for starters:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sculley
…:
In October 1993 Sculley joined a company named Spectrum as their Chairman and CEO.
Spectrum was already involved in a class-action lawsuit brought by investors for what would now be called “Enron-esque” behavior.
By February 1994, Sculley quit the company and filed suit. Spectrum in turn sued Sculley, both actions later being dropped.
In June of 1994 he went to work part-time at Kodak.
In 1995 Sculley and his two brothers started a venture capital firm with their most notable investment being Live Picture.
In February 1995 Sculley became CEO of Live Picture which filed for bankruptcy in May of 1999.
He really has the golden touch, huh?
*The above facts and many more are found in Apple Confidential 2.0 by Owen W. Linzmayer (and I can recommend it completely). I get nothing from the sale of the book, except knowing I may have helped educate fellow Mac users about the very interesting history of our favorite computer company.
Hope this helps.
~M
Dave Mac, That was Jean-Louis Gassée who used to word at Apple and then founded Be, Inc.
Dave Mac:
Jean-Louis Gassee.
Sorry, there should be an accent over the first e, but I don’t know how to do it and my wife (who does) is not here.
~M
Try this for a brief biography of Sculley:-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sculley
bdb,
How do you do that little accent thing?
Used NeXts all through college in the early 90s. Loved them. Come to think, still using them today…
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Mozfan – Hold down the option key, and hit the e key. Lift both fingers up. The next vowel you type will have an acute accent — typing e will produce é, a will produce á, etc.
Doing the same with option-u produces umlauts. There are others, too.
Mozfan,
First type “option-e”
Then type “e” – You get é
(also works on the “i”)
“option-n” then “n” gets you that squiggly thing. ñ
Mozfan,
You can find these keyboard things by using the Keyboard viewer (found in the International System Preferences pane under “Input” – never made much sense to me). You can even have quick access to it by checking the box located at the bottom of that preference pane and it will put a little U.S. flag in your menu bar.
Of course you can also insert many other characters using the “Special Characters” found under the “Edit” menu in most applications, including the Finder.
If you’re using an Apple (and if you’re not… ummm…)… to make the accent over the e, you type option-e and then the letter you want the accent over. In this case, e. So, it’s option-e and then e. é
http://www.g-zus.net/
that squiggly thing “ñ” is use in the spanish language it sounds like an “egne”
John Scully – the judas of the computing world.
Last time I heard about him was when they were extracting 20 year old pepsi bottles out of his a$$.
I have an original 1989 Cube upgraded to an 040 Turbo and 2GB SCSI drive + CDROM right here.
OpenStep 4.2 for Motorola still humming along. I should throw a party for it on its 20th anniversary on teh same power supply. They don’t make modern PCs like the old workstations.
NeXT changed my life. I still dream of a day when personal computers are as well integrated and useful as NEXTSTEP 3.3.
Tháñks älót évérybödy.
I appreciate the help.
~M
If it weren’t for John Sculley, there would be no Apple computer today. If Steve had had his way in 1985, Apple would have gone bankrupt in the 1980’s. That was about the only time in Apple’s history where the company truly was in trouble.
In 1985, Apple’s Board of Directors saw the company was in serious trouble, and they took drastic actions: They removed Steve from power and put Sculley in charge (for real, not as the figurehead CEO he had been up until then).
Sculley turned the company around, put it on very sound financial footing, Apple had its first billion dollar quarter under his leadership and introduced a number of very innovative products, including the Newton. It was during the Sculley era that such concept pieces as Parkbench Navigator, Knowledge Navigator and Future Shock were developed. There was an air of excitement and innovation in the company under Sculley’s leadership.
Sculley’s flaw was his fixation on quarterly profits (i.e. pandering to the whims of Wallstreet). There were several rounds of layoffs during his tenure which, in my opinion, were unnecessary for the long-term financial health of the company (but necessary to appease Wallstreet). Layoffs are always detrimental to employee morale. In fact, i was working at Apple during this period, and was among a group of employees who met with Sculley regarding this issue. While i disagreed with his position, i do respect him for his willingness to meet with our group and listen to our grievances. Not many CEO’s of a similar sized company would have done that.
As far as it goes, Sculley was a pretty good CEO. Spindler, who replaced him, was not nearly as good, and Amelio (who didn’t understand the company nor anything about the industry) was probably the worst (his only saving grace, in retrospect, was bringing Steve back).
Steve Jobs was too young and inexperienced in 1985, and was definitely out-of-control back then. I heard many stories of what a tyrant Steve was back then from people who knew him. I think the experience taught Steve some very valuable lessons. If it hadn’t been for that experience, i don’t think Steve would be half the leader he is today.
Steve needed to be ousted at the time. Even Steve acknowledged this in his Stanford commencement address last year. He said it was bitter medicine, but he guessed it was what the patient needed.
heh, try pronouncing all of that! =)
From what I read from icon,
The reason make bought NEXT was that when the two companies had a presentation of their OS to show Apple, NEXT had bought a copy of there computer and demonstrated NEXT and BeOS didn’t bring anything to demonstrate, so that was why apple bought NEXT. I think BeOS was a little more expensive but this was the main reason from what i read. Have you guys seen this video from someone else who linked it a few days ago. This is Steve Jobs demonstrating NEXT. You can see a lot of OS X from this video. Kinda amazing how advance this thing is. I would say this is 12 plus years old. From the second coming of steve jobs, they had said IBM had wanted NEXT to license the NEXT operating system, but had to stop making computers or something like that. I think this would have made NEXT the dominate OS in business today.
http://homepage.mac.com/hogfish/iMovieTheater17.html
From,
That is an amazing movie! You can really see OS X’s roots and what a visionary Steve Jobs is.
it was nine years ago for me that I was first introduced to the best OS on the planet — who were to think that things were only bound to get better..while, the first run of OSX 10.0 was crap — over time, OS X has made tremendous advancement..I am sure glad I stayed and pushed forward…..once you go Mac — you never go back.
So Apple produced three vaporware videos featuring retards using futuristic computers under Scully? INNOVATION!
It was Jean Louise Gasseé who almost drove apple into the ground after I left because he wast he main reason Macs remained so expensive with such massive profit margins.
And it was not only because he was asking too much for BeOS – which he was – but that BeOS was not as mature a platform to build the future of the Mac on. NeXT had a lot of technologies in it that make it a natural. For example, Display Postscript which we now the graphics system that Aqua and OS X runs on.
Gasseé was good for big talk, but giving something legs? He was too slow and too out of touch with reality.
MY REALITY! Bwahahahahah!
Bozo
Nice input Rainy Day…
Good piece on Gil Amelio here…
http://lowendmac.com/orchard/05/1221.html
“500 Days at the Helm: The Rise and Fall of Gil Amelio”
@Just watched those vaporware videos: You’re not much of a human being if you have to deride the illiterate or people with disabilities. Does it make you feel superior?
And you apparently don’t know the meaning of “vaporware.” Vaporware is where you’re pretending to have something you don’t. Those are clearly “concept pieces.” And i expect we shall see much of that come from Apple in the next few years (if Apple’s patents are any indication).
Everyone….
http://www.cbs.com is holding a vote for the greatest Superbowl commercial every made. The 1984 Mac spot is one of three. Visit http://www.cbs.com and vote! You have less than 20 minutes!
It was Jean Louise Gasseé who almost drove apple into the ground after I left because he wast he main reason Macs remained so expensive with such massive profit margins.
Sorry, but Gassé was never higher than VP.
It was Sculley who insisted on high profit margins, and lost market share.
Thanks for everyone about the Jean Louis reference, I remember running the BeOS on my Mac to see what it looked like and it was cool but it needed work, boy am I glad how things turned out. I also remember loving NeXT when I set it up on some Intel PC’s about 10 years ago to run some Animation apps and hoping that Apple would do the right thing…
Couple of years ago I ran into an ex coworker. She had made a bundle from stock options at our company just pre-bubble-burst, circa 2000 and decided to cash out. I asked her what she was doing and to my surprise she said she was the ‘Executive Assistant’ for Scully.
I proceeded to grill her (tactfully of course). All she could say was that he was involved in some VC stuff. Haven’t heard anything since. So I guess, whatever she and Scully were up to didn’t pan out.
Anyway, Rock on Steve!
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That’s an interesting article, Since_IIci. I know some of it is factually incorrect, however (e.g. Jean Louis Gassée did not quit “shortly before John Sculley became CEO”; Gassée quit about seven years after that). It also tells a far different account for how NeXT was chosen over Be than what i’ve heard elsewhere (i don’t have any inside info on this so i won’t say it’s wrong).
I think perhaps i erred in saying Amelio was the worst Apple CEO. That honor probably goes to Spindler. When i was at Apple, Spindler was a VP under Sculley, and seemed pretty good in that capacity. I left Apple before Spindler became CEO. This commentary reminds me that Spindler didn’t make such great decisions (e.g. it was he who instituted the ill-fated MacOS licensing). Amelio did do some good at Apple; damage control for some of Spindler’s blunders.
That commentary also correctly states that Steve V1 was a lot different than Steve V2, who we all know and love today. Too many people praising Steve V2 – saying it was a shame he was ousted in 1985 – just don’t know he was quite a bit different then. Steve V1 had to go.
Also, a footnote: Steve V1 wasn’t forced out of Apple. He was simply stripped of power. It was Steve’s decision to leave.
Was Sculley the sucker that Bill Gates tricked into signing over Apple GUI rights to MS?
IDon’t
May have happened on Sculley’s watch, but it is blamed on a contractual blunder by a corporate lawyer in several Apple history books I have read.
The book I read (Apple Confidential 2.0) blamed the MS “crown jewels” sign-over on Sculley. Basically, according to that book, they didn’t realise they’d given the GUI technology over for all versions of Windows – they’d only intended to give it to them for Windows 1.x. Sculley later claimed that MS’s lawyers were better than ours. In return for the GUI, Apple got assurances that MS wouldn’t ship Excel for Windows until after a certain date (sometime in 1986 which was a waste of time since it wouldn’t be ready anyway) and to continue working on MS Word. Oh, and to acknowledge in an internal document that Windows was a derivative of Apple’s work. That book compared the deal to Chamberlain’s deal with Hitler in 1938. Good one John.
Microsoft are sh1theads though. Apple had a great Mac Basic coming along, which used the GUI and APIs, and MS wanted them to use their version (which was just a rehash of the command line versions and didn’t use any of the GUI) They more or less forced Apple to kill that project. The bargaining chip used? Continuation of the Basic license for the Apple ][ which was still Apple’s cash cow at that time (Aug. 1985.) In this case, they actively engaged in a downgrading of technology to force their own substandard software to be used.
iDon’t: It happened during the Sculley/Jobs era. It’s not like Sculley or Jobs said to M$, yes, we’ll give you this right in-perpetuity. It was a legal error on the part of Apple’s lawyers by allowing slightly ambiguous language into the contract (language which was interpreted by the courts in a creative way).
The moral to the story is never make a pact with the devil; you will always lose (because lawyers are the devil’s spawn).
Rainy Day,
Your comments are interesting reads, and it is nice to get accurate information on this forum for once.
if I may ask, what were your tasks at Apple ?
Hey “Rainy Day”
Thank you for your posts. Please come back here often.
Do you every post at http://www.folklore.org/
“Sorry, but Gassé was never higher than VP.
It was Sculley who insisted on high profit margins, and lost market share.”
While it’s true that Gassee was never officially in charge at Apple, he had Sculley’s ear, and was very instrumental in many of the decisions made at that time. He was responsible for the higher prices.
Rainy Day is absolutely right. If SJ hadn’t been stripped of power back then, Apple would probably not be here now. It was the best thing that ever happened to him.
Does anyone know of any site that has posted the Mac Performa infomercial from the mid-1990s called “The Martinettis Bring Home A Computer”, which is somewhat about the Performa but mostly about eWorld? The one where grandpa goes online on eWorld and picks up some old chick to have sex with?