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Steve Jobs coaxed John Sculley to join Apple from Pepsi by saying: “Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?”
Jobs and the ex-chief executive are said to have had a few run-ins in the past, but Sculley was keen to dispel the ‘myths’ surrounding his and Jobs’ relationship when the BBC caught up with him at CES. And he thinks Apple’s TV will be a true game changer.
“I think that Apple has revolutionised every other consumer industry, why not television?” he said. According to him, it’s the simplicity Apple brings to devices that will really appeal to telly addicts. “I think that televisions are unnecessarily complex. The irony is that as the pictures get better and the choice of content gets broader, that the complexity of the experience of using the television gets more and more complicated.
“So it seems exactly the sort of problem that if anyone is going to change the experience of what the first principles are, it is going to be Apple.”
Sculley revealed he hasn’t read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, but that he’d heard it confirmed his version of events — “that I never really did fire Steve Jobs and that Apple was actually a very profitable company.”
He says he and Jobs disagreed about the price of the Macintosh — Jobs wanted to reduce it, he wanted to focus on the Apple II — and the board “agreed that my position was the one they wanted to support.”
And he credits Jobs with being ahead of his time with Mac Office and Desktop Publishing. “It wasn’t my idea,” he said, “it was all Steve’s stuff, but he was just a year-and-a-half too early.”
Apple’s TV set is rumoured to launch at the end of this year or beginning of next, and pack Siri for voice control, as well as Kinect-style gesture controls.
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