John Sculley is often painted in a less than flattering light in the storied history of Apple. The man recruited from Pepsi to run the personal computer maker is usually credited with ruining the company after Steve Jobs left. Well, Sculley would like you to know that he didn't destroy Apple.
Speaking to the BBC at the Consumer Electronics Show, Sculley, who ran Apple from 1983 to 1993, said that when he left the company, it was in great health.
"When I left Apple it had $2 billion of cash. It was the most profitable computer company in the world—not just personal computers—and Apple was the number one selling computer," he said. "So the myth that I fired Steve wasn't true and the myth that I destroyed Apple, that wasn't true either. A lot of things happened after I left before Steve came back."
When it comes to Apple's failures around the time of his reign, Sculley chalks it up to the products being too ahead of their time. He uses Macintosh Office as an example of a product released a few years too early.
"When the Macintosh Office was introduced in 1985 and failed Steve went into a very deep funk. He was depressed, and he and I had a major disagreement where he wanted to cut the price of the Macintosh and I wanted to focus on the Apple II because we were a public company," he remembered. But the real reason behind legendary disagreement between Jobs and him was Apple's ceaseless innovation:
"Ironically it was all about Moore's law and it wasn't about Steve and me. Computers just weren't powerful enough in 1985 to do the very rigorous graphics that you had to be able to do for laser printing, and ironically it was only 18 months later when computers were powerful enough that we renamed the Mac Office, Desktop Publishing and it became wildly successful."
Read the rest of the interview at the BBC.
