As the story goes, Steve Jobs, locked in a power struggle with Apple CEO John Sculley (whom he hired, mind you), was acrimoniously fired from the company he founded back in 1985. Apple then floundered until the rehiring of Jobs in 1997 galvanized the company.
In an interview last month, John Sculley finally told his side of the story. According to him, Jobs actually resigned following a proposed demotion from the head of Macintosh due to a disagreement over the marketing of the failed Macintosh computer. Released in 1984, the Mac, Sculley believed, wasn’t yet ready to be advertised heavily as it hadn’t yet met its potential in desktop publishing. So, he argued, the company’s focus should’ve remained on the Apple II, an eight-year-old device at that point. Impatient, Jobs was ready to move on.
“[There] was no question in my mind, either then or later on, that we had no choice but to follow the business strategy which we did,” Sculley explained.
He also added, “I didn’t appreciate, coming out of corporate America… what it meant to a founder, the creator of Macintosh, to be asked to step down from the very division that he created to lead the very product that he believed was going to change the world.
[via Forbes via The Smoking Section]
