For those of you who were not up to snuff on the history of Apple, especially if you happened to have been a child at the time or not yet born, you should know that in May 1985 Apple hired a new CEO and, proceeded to fire Steve Jobs. Well, as El Reg is reporting, Scully now admits that it was a mistake. Well, as history has proven, Steve Jobs was far more successful as a CEO at Apple after his return than John Scully. Perhaps he should have stayed put and continued to sell that sugary, caramel-colored water.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Scully: Jobs Ouster "Was a Mistake."
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 18 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 20 2014, @04:16PM
What a naive non sequitur. Who knows how things would have played out if jobs would never have returned? Yes, he was very successful for himself and apple as well (and horrible for the rest of the world) but since there is only one timeline of history, there is nothing we can compare it with.
Maybe Scully would today lead a much more successful and wildly different apple. Maybe not. The point remains we don't know and thus nothing has been proven.
(Score: 2) by khallow on Sunday April 20 2014, @05:55PM
I consider Scully's opinion evidence that contradicts your assertion. After all, he does have better knowledge of the situation than you do.
Sure, we don't know for absolutely sure that Apple would have been worse off, if Jobs hadn't returned. But the smart money would be on that.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjwt on Sunday April 20 2014, @06:41PM
Let us not forget it was a much humbler Steve Jobs who took money from MS and then went out and built the iMac.. If he had of been at the helm the whole time, maybe iMacs would of come out too early and not been adopted, and driven Apple Bankrupt, or maybe he would've been too focused on ''his'' Apple computers to see the need to accept a cash investment.. The point is no one can say what would've happened, not even the ppl who were involved as well you do not know.. maybe he would of been gunned down in the street, so many probable outcomes its not funny.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday April 20 2014, @08:11PM
Well, anyone can say what would've happened. And we can make a decent educated guess as to what would have happened. Jobs wasn't doing well at the time he got ousted. And his performance since he returned to Apple was from businesses and experience he had gained outside of Apple. So your scenario of a humbler Jobs is probably accurate.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by BasilBrush on Sunday April 20 2014, @06:36PM
Playing the what-if of Jobs not coming back doesn't mean that the alternative of Scully being there is a valid scenario. Scully had already been gone 4 years before Jobs came back. Apple was already failing under Sculley, then after him came Spindler and Amelio before Jobs returned.
Logically we can't say what would have happened if Jobs hadn't returned. But Apple's successes in the 2000s, and eventual rise from near bankruptcy to most successful tech company of all were certainly down to Jobs. And the chances that another CEO would have made a different set of decisions to an equivalent or better result are vanishingly small.
Hurrah! Quoting works now!
(Score: 2) by mendax on Sunday April 20 2014, @06:43PM
Scully was a terrible CEO and would have driven Apple into the ground, or perhaps Apple would have dug itself in under its own inertia. I think the real question is whether Apple would have succeeded if Jobs had remained with Apple. He wouldn't have gotten the experience with NeXT that, perhaps, he would have needed to run Apple effectively. NeXT was not terribly successful. Successful people learn from their mistakes and he sure made some at NeXT.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Angry Jesus on Sunday April 20 2014, @04:18PM
OSX and Cocoa were basically NeXTSTEP 4.0. If Jobs hadn't been forced to do a startup, Apple might never been able to get out of the OS9 funk. Like Muhammad being chased out of Mecca only to return with many more followers and conquer the city.
Plus, getting the boot must have had a major impact on Job's own psyche. I'm sure it was both a humbling and infuriating experience for the guy. Without the experience, he might have just grown lazy and let Apple become too unfocused. After all, Apple was not particularly healthy when he got the boot. That's not to say that Scully improved the situation, just that we'll never know if Jobs would have ridden the company into the ground if he'd been given the chance.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Sunday April 20 2014, @04:55PM
I don't think you're alone in that assessment. I remember an interview in which Woz stated that Jobs getting fired really forced him to re-examine how he was running Apple, so when he came back he was a very different leader than he had been before being fired.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by bill_mcgonigle on Monday April 21 2014, @12:15AM
when he came back he was a very different leader
Yep. I know a guy who was right in the middle of all this. When he saw the Jobs movie, he was irate.
Roughly: "they spent two minutes on NeXT when that was the entire story of how the successful Steve Jobs came into being."
He didn't say this, but after hearing lots of details, what they did was tell Star Wars by summarizing Empire Strikes Back as "Han gets frozen, Luke becomes a Jedi" - now iPods! ... errr, Ewoks!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Sunday April 20 2014, @05:42PM
... then again, they might have taken the open approach to replace OS9 and gone with Linux or pure BSD and just sold well designed hardware rather than a locked eco-system. We'll never know.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by edIII on Sunday April 20 2014, @08:33PM
Not even a small chance.
I strongly dislike Jobs precisely due to his visions always involving locked down eco-systems. Back in the 90's, when I didn't know any better, I really liked him. I did like Apple and my first system was an Apple IIe. He was a very strange man though and did contradictory things. Over all, he was just a control freak and an ass.
From what I have gathered from articles over the years, and his own attitude, was that Jobs never really felt that cyberspace or computing needed to be open or free. He was shameless about taking great ideas from others and then running with it. While I don't have a problem with that, Jobs always envisioned his products as being under the control of Apple even while in the hands of people who bought the product.
Jobs really did feel that computing could be like a wide open country, but what he wanted it to be was like a series of train tracks that Apple controlled, and you could only get onto those tracks with his hardware.
He was a megalomaniac and romanticized notions people had about him supporting FOSS/Open Source are just plain wrong. As terrible as it is to say it, I think the world is better of with Jobs dead (or at least his direct influence removed).
Any chance we have of creating truly free computing and having the Internet remain free can only happen with people like Jobs out of the way. He was never a friend to Linux or BSD. Look at how Apple ripped off Samsung and then declared nuclear war (Jobs words) to destroy Android. That man was more of a threat to FOSS and Open Source than Ballmer was on his worst/best day.
You may be right that Linux/BSD could have been on every desktop, but it would have been a locked down POS version like their operating systems now. If Apple was so good and supportive of FOSS/Open Source it would have never had the words "jail break" associated with the hardware and software.
No, there could be no real freedom with people like Jobs that have such an entitlement/god complex that they believe it's correct and ethical to control people's computing experiences. Jobs felt he knew better than I did what was good for me and how I should be able to use computing in my life.
The man's dead and I hate to speak ill of the dead, but fuck Jobs. Those kind of people are why we have locked eco-systems in the first place where privacy and autonomy are foreign concepts in computing.
You're here (partially at least) because you hate to be relegated to an audience member. That's all that Jobs ever saw anybody else being. A member of the audience and he was the grand architect of your experience.
Audience members don't get nice things like Linux and FOSS.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 21 2014, @12:09AM
Sudden fit of necrophilia?
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday April 21 2014, @01:04AM
I meant if Jobs had not come back, but thanks for the rant. I am very much of the same opinion about Jobs, Apple, and SlashDot.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by BasilBrush on Sunday April 20 2014, @06:52PM
Jobs was never shy about making big difficult decisions. He'd certainly have seen when classic Mac OS was becoming outdated, and probably Apple would have made a successful transition earlier.
Yes, getting fired from the company he founded must have had a profound effect on Jobs. But he'd already been extremely successful and exhibited the traits that made him a great when that happened.
Hurrah! Quoting works now!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 21 2014, @06:39PM
There was a second (and not so poor) choice: BeOS... So yes, in the Apple plans, it was going to get out of the "OS9 funk".
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday April 20 2014, @04:47PM
My n-gram algo asks if we are referring to some John Sculley instead.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 20 2014, @05:32PM
at least you can do more with brown-sugary-caramel-water then with iFruit products: .. the possibilities are endless. ...
you can snort it, puke it, shoot it, pour it, freeze it
on the other hand you cannot right-click the PPC chip on a PCI bus. not to mention adding a attachment
to iMAIL (on the pad thingy) and browse the directory : )
both are easy to consume though and will prolly cause some kind of rot, be it teeth or brain
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 21 2014, @04:18AM
> Perhaps he should have stayed put and continued to sell that sugary, caramel-colored water.
This is a reference to what Jobs was selling at Apple right?