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Jobs didn't have anything personal against Sculley most likely, but it was revenge on the takeover from product/engineering/creative people to sales/marketing/M

Jobs didn't have anything personal against Sculley most likely, but it was revenge on the takeover from product/engineering/creative people to sales/marketing/MBA control at Apple. [1] Steve Jobs knew the problem when the product people get driven out from the decision making, the coup d'état from the value creators to the value extractors. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AxZofbMGpM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AxZofbMGpM

Angostura 7y ago
That must have been why Jobs immediately shut down lots of innovative engineering-lead projects such as OpenDoc.
- tarsinge 7y ago
  Sorry if I don't get the sarcasm but OpenDoc was the typical big entreprise sales/marketing driven project, with corporate partnership and architectural concepts having way more weights than engineering and usage realities. This was nowhere near the original Apple ADN and was more of a typical enterprise IBM services project. It's a no brainer it was shut down given Steve vision for Apple.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    OpenDoc came straight from the Advanced Technology Group. It was definitely engineering led.
    - AlanYx 7y ago
      The initial OpenDoc architecture came out of ATG, but by mid-1992 it had been folded into the AIM Alliance, a shared Apple, IBM and Motorola group. IBM contributed SOM, which was architecturally very heavy/baroque. By 1996 OpenDoc was folded into the OMG umbrella and then it really became bogged down in design by multi-corporate consensus.
  - yardie 7y ago
    I know an engineer from the OpenDoc group. A genius at regex. OpenDoc used a shitload of regex behind the scenes.
- eej71 7y ago
  Jobs provides a thoughtful answer here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE
scarface74 7y ago
Well, looking at the history of Jobs in particular before he came back to Apple, I would say just the opposite. The Lisa, Apple ///, original Mac, and the NeXT were all failures because they didn’t get the importance of actually creating products that people wanted. Engineers seldom understand the needs of the broader market. The “Engineers” also gave you great stuff in the mid 90s like PowerTalk, QuickDraw GX, OpenDoc, and other products that no one wanted. As far as creative people - letting them take over gets you the trash can Mac Pro, iOS 7, and the MacBook keyboard. Engineers are infamous for not wanting to deal with pesky things like customers and usually don’t care whether their designs can lead to products that can be produced at scale. Apple would still be floundering without the “MBA types” like Cook who got operations under control and Schiller who was over marketing. Scully - the “sugar water salesman” - saved Apple the first time around after the missteps of Jobs. Even today you can look at Google to see what happens when you have great engineers but no leadership. They are still an ad business despite years of trying to diversify.
- foobar_ 7y ago
  Unfortunately, programming is the middle ground between engineering and art. It's a dancing architecture. Because of this value-extractors and their thinking is borderline asine as seen in the case of crappy products in the dotcom bust and the recent wework comedy.
- socialdemocrat 7y ago
  Kind of an attempt of rewrite of history there. Sure Steve Jobs did many stupid things and had to temper himself. But let us not forget that after he left Apple was on a never ending downward slope. It was when Steve Jobs came back and put product designers in the drivers seat that Apple actually became one of the worlds most valuable companies. I have seen this over and over again. Where I am from an Apple reseller was first started by enthusiasts and made it big until MBA types took over only caring about the short term bottom line. They killed the company because customers stopped having faith in the sales people having their interests at heart. It was all about selling you maximum amount of stuff. They got kicked to the curb by a new upstart mac reseller where the owners really cared about the product and customers enjoying their Mac experience, not just getting money. The problem with the MBA style guys is that don't really see the value of anything. They just see money. That can only take you so far.
leoc 7y ago
Jobs' personal falling out with Sculley is well-documented, not least in the Isaacson bio. Now I suspect there were also hard policy disagreements behind Jobs' departure which haven't got enough attention (I think that NeXT is probably very close to what Jobs had wanted to do as an initiative inside Apple, while the more conservative Macintosh II "Big Mac" is what Apple did instead) but the personal drama was quite real.
- scarface74 7y ago
  And you see why they had to get rid of Jobs. The Next hardware was a failure.
  - leoc 7y ago
    That's a hard hypothetical question, and the failure of NeXT to sell hardware doesn't give that much insight into the answer. What Apple (near-)ideally needed in the mid-to-late '80s was probably both a high-end Macintosh offering and an in-house NeXT: ideally on the same hardware like the early OS X-compatible Macs, though that was probably not a hard necessity in the early stages. Whether Jobs could have been made to go along with that mixed approach is unclear. However we do know that without Jobs Apple flailed around with Taligent/Pink for so long that it almost destroyed the company while NeXT shipped before 1989. (Why Apple didn't just choose to get serious about A/UX is another mystery.) What really seems to have hurt NeXT, at least as a Macintosh competitor or successor, was lack of support from the important Macintosh ISVs. An in-house Apple NeXT would have had a much better shot at charming or squeezing the ISVs into supporting the platform, though again there are questions such as when or if a never-fired late-'80s or early-'90s Jobs would have gone along with something like Carbon. Similarly the Apple branding and imprimatur would have helped to reassure purchasers who were leery of jumping ship to an independent NeXT. By contrast the high cost of NeXT hardware was probably not a critical problem, at least for the NeXT as a next Macintosh: Macintosh IIs cost about the same as equivalent NeXT systems. And in any case NeXT's cost problems seem to have been partly due to the expense of its own, gold-plated manufacturing operation, something even Jobs would not have replicated at an Apple-internal NeXT. The independent NeXT was also hindered by the legal agreements and legal actions between it and Apple. Finally, it also faced increasing pressure to turn a profit at a time when Apple was highly profitable and would have been able to treat an in-house NeXT as a vital strategic investment in its future.

Angostura 7y ago

That must have been why Jobs immediately shut down lots of innovative engineering-lead projects such as OpenDoc.

tarsinge 7y ago
Sorry if I don't get the sarcasm but OpenDoc was the typical big entreprise sales/marketing driven project, with corporate partnership and architectural concepts having way more weights than engineering and usage realities. This was nowhere near the original Apple ADN and was more of a typical enterprise IBM services project. It's a no brainer it was shut down given Steve vision for Apple.
- scarface74 7y ago
  OpenDoc came straight from the Advanced Technology Group. It was definitely engineering led.
  - AlanYx 7y ago
    The initial OpenDoc architecture came out of ATG, but by mid-1992 it had been folded into the AIM Alliance, a shared Apple, IBM and Motorola group. IBM contributed SOM, which was architecturally very heavy/baroque. By 1996 OpenDoc was folded into the OMG umbrella and then it really became bogged down in design by multi-corporate consensus.
- yardie 7y ago
  I know an engineer from the OpenDoc group. A genius at regex. OpenDoc used a shitload of regex behind the scenes.
eej71 7y ago
Jobs provides a thoughtful answer here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE

scarface74 7y ago

Well, looking at the history of Jobs in particular before he came back to Apple, I would say just the opposite. The Lisa, Apple ///, original Mac, and the NeXT were all failures because they didn’t get the importance of actually creating products that people wanted. Engineers seldom understand the needs of the broader market. The “Engineers” also gave you great stuff in the mid 90s like PowerTalk, QuickDraw GX, OpenDoc, and other products that no one wanted. As far as creative people - letting them take over gets you the trash can Mac Pro, iOS 7, and the MacBook keyboard. Engineers are infamous for not wanting to deal with pesky things like customers and usually don’t care whether their designs can lead to products that can be produced at scale. Apple would still be floundering without the “MBA types” like Cook who got operations under control and Schiller who was over marketing. Scully - the “sugar water salesman” - saved Apple the first time around after the missteps of Jobs. Even today you can look at Google to see what happens when you have great engineers but no leadership. They are still an ad business despite years of trying to diversify.

foobar_ 7y ago
Unfortunately, programming is the middle ground between engineering and art. It's a dancing architecture. Because of this value-extractors and their thinking is borderline asine as seen in the case of crappy products in the dotcom bust and the recent wework comedy.
socialdemocrat 7y ago
Kind of an attempt of rewrite of history there. Sure Steve Jobs did many stupid things and had to temper himself. But let us not forget that after he left Apple was on a never ending downward slope. It was when Steve Jobs came back and put product designers in the drivers seat that Apple actually became one of the worlds most valuable companies. I have seen this over and over again. Where I am from an Apple reseller was first started by enthusiasts and made it big until MBA types took over only caring about the short term bottom line. They killed the company because customers stopped having faith in the sales people having their interests at heart. It was all about selling you maximum amount of stuff. They got kicked to the curb by a new upstart mac reseller where the owners really cared about the product and customers enjoying their Mac experience, not just getting money. The problem with the MBA style guys is that don't really see the value of anything. They just see money. That can only take you so far.

leoc 7y ago

Jobs' personal falling out with Sculley is well-documented, not least in the Isaacson bio. Now I suspect there were also hard policy disagreements behind Jobs' departure which haven't got enough attention (I think that NeXT is probably very close to what Jobs had wanted to do as an initiative inside Apple, while the more conservative Macintosh II "Big Mac" is what Apple did instead) but the personal drama was quite real.

scarface74 7y ago
And you see why they had to get rid of Jobs. The Next hardware was a failure.
- leoc 7y ago
  That's a hard hypothetical question, and the failure of NeXT to sell hardware doesn't give that much insight into the answer. What Apple (near-)ideally needed in the mid-to-late '80s was probably both a high-end Macintosh offering and an in-house NeXT: ideally on the same hardware like the early OS X-compatible Macs, though that was probably not a hard necessity in the early stages. Whether Jobs could have been made to go along with that mixed approach is unclear. However we do know that without Jobs Apple flailed around with Taligent/Pink for so long that it almost destroyed the company while NeXT shipped before 1989. (Why Apple didn't just choose to get serious about A/UX is another mystery.) What really seems to have hurt NeXT, at least as a Macintosh competitor or successor, was lack of support from the important Macintosh ISVs. An in-house Apple NeXT would have had a much better shot at charming or squeezing the ISVs into supporting the platform, though again there are questions such as when or if a never-fired late-'80s or early-'90s Jobs would have gone along with something like Carbon. Similarly the Apple branding and imprimatur would have helped to reassure purchasers who were leery of jumping ship to an independent NeXT. By contrast the high cost of NeXT hardware was probably not a critical problem, at least for the NeXT as a next Macintosh: Macintosh IIs cost about the same as equivalent NeXT systems. And in any case NeXT's cost problems seem to have been partly due to the expense of its own, gold-plated manufacturing operation, something even Jobs would not have replicated at an Apple-internal NeXT. The independent NeXT was also hindered by the legal agreements and legal actions between it and Apple. Finally, it also faced increasing pressure to turn a profit at a time when Apple was highly profitable and would have been able to treat an in-house NeXT as a vital strategic investment in its future.