Sony’s CEO gave Sculley and Jobs the first Walkman and tours of the factories that made them, and all this impressed Jobs a great deal. Sony’s products, Sony’s factories, the clothes the workers wore, everything – Jobs loved it. The Sculley interview contains – among other things – another gem: Steve Jobs was in love with Sony. What do you mean, Steve’s a perfectionist? Boom, multi-million dollar profit machine won’t ship because the whites aren’t exactly the same. The reason? The company that manufactures the white faceplate and the company that produces the home button can’t get their colours properly aligned. Such a perfectionist, in fact, that Apple HQ is sitting on a pile of white iPhone 4s, without actually shipping them out to customers. He was methodical and careful about everything – a perfectionist to the end.” “He was a person of huge vision,” Sculley notes, “But he was also a person that believed in the precise detail of every step. His description of Steve Jobs is pretty much what you’d expect. In an interview with Cult of Mac, John Sculley details his time at Apple in quite some detail and dripping with honesty – admitting his mistakes along the way.
REASONS WHY MAC IS BETTER THAN PC STEVE JOBS SOFTWARE
Only 50000 NeXT computers were sold, but who cares – it’s the company’s software that mattered, software containing innovations we still rely on every single day. We know what happened then – Jobs founded NEXT, which made awesome innovative products but eventually failed in the marketplace due to curious design decisions, such as the prohibitively expensive and unreliable magneto-optical drive it used for storage. More importantly, Sculley’s management style clashed with that of Steve Jobs, causing Jobs to eventually be cast out of the company. In the meantime, real issues like MacOS being an unstable mess were never addressed. However, Apple had become an organisational mess, with boatloads of projects that would never yield any marketable results, but would still get funding. While he nearly ran the company into the ground, he also increased sales from 800 million per year to 8 billion per year. The former and very successful PepsiCo president joined Apple as CEO in 1983. John Sculley is not an entirely uncontroversial figure in Apple’s history. This anecdote ties in nicely with a very interesting interview with John Sculley about Steve Jobs’ ways of doing business. Now we know why: the manufacturers Apple employs are apparently having issues matching the shades of white of the various components. Is it an indication of Steve Jobs’ (in)famous strive for perfection, or just stupid bone-headedness? The white variant of the iPhone 4 was first delayed for a few weeks, but those few weeks became ‘end of the year’.