Autumn Marathon

This interview of long-ago Apple CEO John Sculley is notable for the evidence it presents about Jobs’ genius, its analysis of the reasons behind his and Apple’s success, and for the rare humility demonstrated by Sculley.  Overall takeaway is that what we perceive as Jobs’ genius was hard work and took a long time to develop.

Highlights for me were:

• Jobs was obsessed with design from the outset, but the “systems thinking” he evolved did not truly become a competitive advantage until technology and Moore’s Law evolved to allow people to hold powerful computers in the palm of their hands. 
• Apple was criticized for not licensing MacOS in the 1980s, but at that time there was no licensable OS because in order to run graphics on the weak computers of the day, many subroutines had to be run on hardware.  Original Mac could perform 3 MIPs (million instructions per second) versus current iMac which executes 40,000 MIPs. 
• Jobs always had a white-board in his office (like many engineers and creatives), but not because he used it himself.  Others would draw for him and he had the great taste to retain the best designs.
• Apple’s Newton, one of the company’s great failures (which led to Sculley’s demise as CEO), led directly to the creation of the ARM processor technology.  Apple sold it’s share in ARM for $800 million during it’s difficult years in the 1990s.  That kept the company alive, but the stake would have been worth billions.