Former Apple CEO John Sculley says he never fired co-founder Steve Jobs: "We [Apple] had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started?" he quipped. "Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out."
Jobs went on to add that "getting fired from Apple" turned out to be "the best thing that could have ever happened" to him.
To Jobs' credit, Sculley was quick to point out that technology eventually caught up to Jobs' vision of what it could do. For instance, he said Jobs' work at NeXT was too early for its time, but eventually was used as "the core for Apple's recovery" when computers were powerful enough and the cost of technology had come down enough.
At the least, both Jobs and Sculley agreed that hiring him as CEO was a mistake.
"I hired the wrong guy," Jobs said in a 1995 interview that was recently re-discovered. "He destroyed everything I spent ten years working for. Starting with me but that wasn't the saddest part. I would have gladly left Apple if Apple would have turned out like I wanted it to."
Sculley admitted in a 2010 interview that it was a "big mistake" that he was brought on as CEO since he came in "not knowing anything about computers."
"My guess is that we never would have had the breakup if the board had done a better job of thinking through not just how do we get a CEO to come and join the company that Steve will approve of, but how do we make sure that we create a situation where this thing is going to be successful over time?" he said.
Jobs went on to add that "getting fired from Apple" turned out to be "the best thing that could have ever happened" to him.
To Jobs' credit, Sculley was quick to point out that technology eventually caught up to Jobs' vision of what it could do. For instance, he said Jobs' work at NeXT was too early for its time, but eventually was used as "the core for Apple's recovery" when computers were powerful enough and the cost of technology had come down enough.
At the least, both Jobs and Sculley agreed that hiring him as CEO was a mistake.
"I hired the wrong guy," Jobs said in a 1995 interview that was recently re-discovered. "He destroyed everything I spent ten years working for. Starting with me but that wasn't the saddest part. I would have gladly left Apple if Apple would have turned out like I wanted it to."
Sculley admitted in a 2010 interview that it was a "big mistake" that he was brought on as CEO since he came in "not knowing anything about computers."
"My guess is that we never would have had the breakup if the board had done a better job of thinking through not just how do we get a CEO to come and join the company that Steve will approve of, but how do we make sure that we create a situation where this thing is going to be successful over time?" he said.