From the Oral History Collection of the Computerworld Honors Program:
"John Sculley ruined Apple and he ruined it by bringing a set of values to the top of Apple which were corrupt and corrupted some of the top people who were there, drove out some of the ones who were not corruptible, and brought in more corrupt ones and paid themselves collectively tens of millions of dollars and cared more about their own glory and wealth than they did about what built Apple in the first place-- which was making great computers for people to use.
They didn't care about that anymore. They didn't have a clue about how to do it and they didn't take any time to find out because that's not what they cared about. They cared about making a lot of money so they had this wonderful thing that a lot of brilliant people made called the Macintosh and they got very greedy and instead of following the original trajectory of the original vision--which was to make this thing an appliance, to get this out there to as many people as possible--they went for profits and they made outlandish profits for about four years. Apple was one of the most profitable companies in America for about four years.
What that cost them was the future. What they should have been doing was making reasonable profits and going for market share, which was what we always tried to do. Macintosh would have had a thirty- three percent market share right now, maybe even higher, maybe it would have even been Microsoft but we'll never know. Now its got a single digit market share and falling. There's no way to ever get that moment in time back. The Macintosh will die in another few years and its really sad."
Hey, tell us how you really feel!
He was right about the Mac; OS X is not a 1995 Mac. It's a completely different, Unix-based OS. The old Mac did die with OS 9. The last vestiges are gone with the new Intel-based machines, which can't even run OS 9 except by means of 3rd-party emulator hacks very few people will ever use. It will be easier to run Windows on an Intel Mac than OS 9.
Do you know Steve Jobs email or home address?
Posted by: Guy | October 23, 2007 at 09:02 AM