“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.