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Sculley: Uh, maybe I shouldn’t have fired Steve Jobs

invisibleSHIELD case for iPad“In the annals of blown calls, it ranks somewhere between the publishers who turned down the first Harry Potter book and baseball umpire Jim Joyce’s instantly infamous perfect-game flub last week,” Thomas E. Weber reports for The Daily Beast. “It was the spring of 1985, and the board of Apple Computer decided it no longer needed the services of one Steven P. Jobs.”

“Fate had a doozy in store for the men—and they were all men—who dumped the famously combative Jobs. The upstart they fired eclipsed them by many magnitudes, as emphasized two weeks ago when Apple passed Microsoft to become the most valuable technology company in the world,” Weber reports. “The key antagonist in the tech world’s biggest soap opera of a quarter-century ago: John Sculley, the Pepsi executive whom Apple’s board brought in as CEO to oversee Jobs and grow the company.”

Weber reports, “Sculley says he accepts responsibility for his role but also believes that Apple’s board should have understood that Jobs needed to be in charge. ‘My sense is that it probably would never have broken down between Steve and me if we had figured out different roles,’ Sculley says. ‘Maybe he should have been the CEO and I should have been the president. It should have been worked out ahead of time, and that’s one of those things you look to a really good board to do.'”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: ‘Twas the unprepared sugared water salesbozo who signed the poorly-written contract that unleashed the Dark Age of Personal Computing on the world; a darkness from which most are only now slowly emerging. The fool had a penchant for making unbelievably massive mistakes. Sculley makes Ballmer look like a business genius.

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