

Being Steve Jobs's Boss - jgamman
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_44/b4201096309840.htm?chan=magazine+channel_top+stories

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alanthonyc
Link to the actual interview (this article looks like just a rehash):
[http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the-
full...](http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the-full-
interview-transcript/63295)

HN discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1790566>

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Locke1689
_So Intel (INTC) lobbied heavily to get us to stay with them … [but] we went
with IBM and Motorola (MOT) with the PowerPC. And that was a terrible decision
in hindsight. If we could have worked with Intel, we would have gotten onto a
more commoditized component platform for Apple, which would have made a huge
difference for Apple during the 1990s. So we totally missed the boat. Intel
would spend $11 billion and evolve the Intel processor to do graphics … and it
was a terrible technical decision. I wasn't technically qualified,
unfortunately, so I went along with the recommendation._

I'm not confident he's correct. It certainly wasn't the wrong technical
decision -- it may have been the wrong business decision.

~~~
andreyf
Thought that, too: good thing he's not CEO anymore, I could just imagine him
in a meeting "Why does A4 run RISC? We got burned by that already, we're
sticking with CISC this time!"

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andreyf
_He felt the computer was going to change the world, and it was going to
become what he called "the bicycle for the mind."_

I'd heard Alan Kay repeat this many times. I don't know of much hard evidence
(I'd really appreciate some, if you do), but I have a feeling that Alan Kay
and the Smalltalk community was a great inspiration to Steve Jobs and Apple's
way of thinking.

~~~
bhiggins
Alan Kay and Steve Jobs go way back...

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objective-C>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook>

That said, Smalltalk is overrated.

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greendestiny
I think its probably more fair to say that after many years of being massively
underrated and overlooked the lip service which computer science pays to
Smalltalk is way higher than the actual amount of work put into the ecosystem
around the language.

~~~
bhiggins
Smalltalk is like Libertarianism. It allows for those who find reality too
difficult or hard to understand an escape to an ideology that is simple,
elegant, and wrong.

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rradu
_> People say he killed the Newton- your pet project- out of revenge. Do you
think he did it for revenge?

> Probably. He won't talk to me, so I don't know. _

They still don't talk? After all these years?

~~~
solutionyogi
Why would you expect Steve to talk to him?

In an interview, Steve said, "I hired the wrong guy. He destroyed everything I
spent 10 years working for."

[Direct link to the segment: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MwD-
TZ6r9Y&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MwD-
TZ6r9Y&feature=related#t=5m27s) ]

Hear him say the above words, you will feel the pain in his voice. If I was in
his place, I would never ever talk to Scully again.

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nutjob123
I thought this was hilarious. "I remember going into Steve's house, and he had
almost no furniture in it. He just had a picture of Einstein, whom he admired
greatly, and he had a Tiffany lamp and a chair and a bed."

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kqr2
Famous photo which captures this:

<http://www.life2point0.com/images/2007/12/14/stevejobs.jpg>

~~~
Alex3917
This looks like a very luxurious crack den, which actually probably isn't too
far off.

You have to wonder whether, given his LSD use and whatever underlying
emotional issues he may have had, how psychologically healthy he was at the
time.

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sunjain
As he puts it Apple is foremost a design company. I see interesting rivalry
brewing up between Apple and Google. One where design is paramount and other
where engineering is paramount. In fact in the tech world, Apple stands out as
a design company where as pretty much everybody is more or less engineering
and marketing company.

~~~
bluishgreen
Apple can do engineering, Google cannot design.

~~~
varjag
I remember back in the day <http://google.com> was touted as masterpiece of
design.

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Nekojoe
I love this quote - "We talked a lot about how perception leads reality and
how if you are going to create a reality, you have to be able to create the
perception."

It sounds like the concept of the reality distortion field.

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shareme
I offer a counter to the assumption on page 2 of the article..

Its not User experience in its end-all but reducing R and D costs with right R
and D choices that allowed the focus on user experience. Let me explain.

Several universities concentrated on Mach Kernel OS design patterns. Thu,s
when SJ left Apple he founded NEXT based upon extending this pattern with an
OOP C language as the trade-offs with MACH in the OS do not benefit unless you
adapt an OOP language to build the apps sitting on top that Mach Kernel OS and
to be blunt C++ is a poor OOP computer language.

So when NEXT was acquired by Apple they had the opportunity to lower R&D costs
as the initial R&D costs for this new way had already been paid by NEXT. Apple
in its purchase of NEXT was just securing a price level of R&D for the next 20
years by buying the R&D team.

The assumption that Apple started with user experience is somewhat miss-guided
and completely wrong.

To give you an idea of that initial R&D investment ..how many decades has GNU
Hurd been limping along? Exactly..

