Sunday, January 30, 2011

Sculley on Apple and Steve Jobs

http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the-full-interview-transcript

Did not know Sculley is a huge Steve-Fanboy. Will be good to see Steve Jobs himself write a book about Product Design and Development someday.

Sculley's quotes from the article:
"Steve had a rule that there could never be more than one hundred people on the Mac team. So if you wanted to add someone you had to take someone out."
"Steve’s point of reference was Sony at the time. He really wanted to be Sony. He didn’t want to be IBM. He didn’t want to be Microsoft."
"It is only at Apple where design reports directly to the CEO."
"In bureaucracies many people have the authority to say no, not the authority to say yes. So you end up with products with compromises. This goes back to Steve’s philosophy that the most important decisions are the things you decide NOT to do, not what you decide to do. It’s the minimalist thinking again."
"Not only did he learn about retail, I’ve never been in a better store than an Apple store. It has the highest revenue per square foot of any store in the world but it’s not just the revenue, it’s the experience."
"So I was given the assignment to go off and try to sell Apple in 1993. So I went off and tried to sell it to AT&T to IBM and other people."
"The Newton actually saved Apple from going bankrupt. Most people don’t realize in order to build Newton, we had to build a new generation microprocessor."
"Steve was a fanatic on looking at how things were printed: the fonts, the colors, the layouts."