John Sculley opens up in this above article about being Steve Jobs' boss in 1984. He illustrates the genius of Steve Jobs and how his ideas changed many digital products companies and electronic products companies to what they are today.
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Steve Jobs was 28 years old in 1983 and already recognized as one of the most innovative thinkers in Silicon Valley. The Apple (NasdaqGS: AAPL - News) board, though, was not ready to anoint him chief executive officer and picked PepsiCo (NYSE: PEP, News) President John Sculley, famous for creating the Pepsi Challenge, to lead the company. Sculley helped increase Apple's sales from $800 million to $8 billion annually during his decade as CEO, but he also presided over Jobs' departure, which sent Apple into what Sculley calls its "near-death experience." In his first extensive interview on the subject, Sculley tells Cultofmac.com editor Leander Kahney how his partnership with Jobs came to be, how design ruled — and still rules — everything at Apple, and why he never should have been CEO in the first place.
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Steve, from the moment I met him, always loved beautiful products, especially hardware. He came to my house, and he was fascinated, because I had special hinges and locks designed for doors. I had studied as an industrial designer, and the thing that connected Steve and me was industrial design. It wasn't computing.
Steve had this perspective that always started with the user's experience; and that industrial design was an incredibly important part of that user impression. He recruited me to Apple because he believed the computer was eventually going to become a consumer product. That was an outrageous idea back in the early 1980s. He felt the computer was going to change the world, and it was going to become what he called "the bicycle for the mind."
What makes Steve's methodology different from everyone else's is that he always believed the most important decisions you make are not the things you do, but the things you decide not to do. He's a minimalist. 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. He just didn't believe in having lots of things around, but he was incredibly careful in what he selected. end quote.
I like the concept of "The Bicycle for the mind". I remember I too, shared the dream of home computers but had no idea the DARPA redundancy computer program invented to keep going in all government mainframe computers worldwide all information necessary to continue if one or more locations were nuked would be turned into the internet where Wikipedia could be literally asked any question about anything and have a reasonable chance of having the right and useful answer by any internet user worldwide. What has happened is pretty unbelievable, and I have the feeling the world is just getting started in unbelievable things created by people like Steve Jobs and others internationally.
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