A long time ago John Sculley won a power struggle against Steve Jobs. Scully ran Apple, Jobs was out.
Sculley was interviewed by Leander Kahney at Cult of Mac:
All the stuff we did then were all his ideas. I understood his methodology. We never changed it. So we didn’t license the products. We focused on industrial design. We actually built up our own in-house design organization, which they have to this day. We developed the PowerBook… We developed QuickTime. All these things were built around Steve’s philosophy… It was all about sales and marketing and the evolution of the products.
All the design ideas were clearly Steve’s. The one who should really be given credit for all that stuff while I was there is really Steve.
And then Sculley was out and Apple had a several new CEO’s who all seemed unable to make Apple work. And then Apple bought Steve back as an interim CEO through their purchase of NeXT and finally Steve returned to Apple to begin the odyssey which is one of the most dramatic corporate stories in the history of corporations. Apple is now $300/share and its growth rate looks likely to increase with no end in sight. Apple is currently the second largest company by market capitalisation in the world and its closing in on Exxon, the largest, rather rapidly.
Here’s how Sculley characterises Job’s “secret”
Sculley, who is impressed with how Jobs “sticks to his same first principles years later,” shared 11 of those principles: beautiful design; customer experience; no focus groups; perfectionism; vision; minimalism; hire the best; sweat the details; keep it small; reject bad work; perfection and systems thinker.
No product is perfect and some are more successful than others but when you buy an Apple product you feel the result of those qualities which went into making it as you use it.
