Mr. Sculley goes on to say: “When I left Apple it had $2bn (£1.3bn) of cash. It was the most profitable computer company in the world – not just personal computers – and Apple was the number one selling computer. So the myth that I fired Steve wasn’t true and the myth that I destroyed Apple, that wasn’t true either.”
According to Mr. Sculley, the main point of contention between him and Mr. Jobs was the latter’s desire to slash the Macintosh’s price, which the former disagreed with. He says: “We had to have the profits of the Apple II and we couldn’t afford to cut the price of the Macintosh because we needed the profits from the Apple II to show our earnings – not just to cover the Mac’s problems. That’s what led to the disagreement and the showdown between me and Steve and eventually the board investigated it and agreed that my position was the one they wanted to support.”
Mr. Sculley recalls that the failure of Macintosh Office after its introduction in 1985 caused Mr. Jobs to go into “a very deep funk.” He adds: “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. It wasn’t my idea, it was all Steve’s stuff, but he was just a year and a half too early.”
He says that the idea of being too far ahead of the curve also led to the ill-fated Apple Newton’s struggles. “The Newton was clearly much too ambitious, just like Steve’s Macintosh Office was a year and a half too early. Newton was probably 15 years too early … Even if the product itself never survived the technology did.”
Asked about Apple’s rumored entry into the TV market, Mr. Sculley responded: “I think that televisions are unnecessarily complex. The irony is that as the pictures get better and the choice of content gets broader, that the complexity of the experience of using the television gets more and more complicated. So it seems exactly the sort of problem that if anyone is going to change the experience of what the first principles are, it is going to be Apple.”