Steve Jobs on Getting Fired from Apple: The painful split
What Jobs talks about
Jobs explains how his relationship with John Sculley broke down after serious disagreements and a recession hit Apple in late 1984. He says the conflict was less about vision than execution, leadership, and who could actually steady the company.
He argues that Apple needed stronger leadership to unite the Mac and Apple II efforts and keep investing in the Macintosh. Instead, he says the board sided with Sculley and he was pushed out of the company he had helped build.
Jobs also reflects on Apple’s condition in 1995, saying the company had drifted from the future he saw when he left. He contrasts Apple’s earlier lead with the years of development that followed, and suggests the company lost its original momentum.
An interviewer asks the questions; Jobs answers throughout.
In his words
“Oh, it was very painful.”
“I hired the wrong guy.”
“He destroyed the work I had been working for 10 years.”
“There was a leadership vacuum in Apple.”
“Apple's dying today.”
Key points
- Jobs says the breakup with Sculley was painful and personal.
- He argues he hired the wrong CEO and that Sculley lacked a vision for Apple.
- The 1984 recession, he says, exposed a leadership vacuum inside the company.
- Jobs believed Apple needed to unite around the Macintosh and keep investing in key products.
- He says the board trusted Sculley and made Jobs the scapegoat.
- He thinks Apple would have been wiser to give him a new project instead of forcing him out.
- He calls Apple’s later decline a loss of the values that once made the company exceptional.
Full transcript
After serious disagreements with CEO John Sculley, Steve left the company in 1985. Tell us about your departure from Apple. Oh, it was very painful. I don't want to talk about it. What can I say? I hired the wrong guy. That was Sculley? Yes. And he destroyed the work I had been working for 10 years. Starting with me, but that wasn't the subject. I would have gladly left Apple if it had developed the way I wanted it to. Basically, John got on a rocket that was about to take off. And when it took off, he kind of went into a state of confusion, and thought that he was the one who built the rocket.
And then he kind of sort of changed the trajectory of the flight, so that the rocket was supposed to fall to the ground. Well, it was always before Macintosh, and on the first days of Macintosh, it was always Steve and John's show. You were kind of in charge of everything. Right. And then something happened to split you. That's correct. What was that catalyst? Well, it was that the industry went into a recession in late 1984. Sales started seriously contracting. And John didn't know what to do. He had not a clue. And there was a leadership vacuum in Apple. There were fairly strong people running the Mac department.
I was running the Mac department. I also ran the Apple II department, and so on. There were some problems with some departments. The storage department was run by one unreliable person, and you had to change a lot of things. But all of these problems got worse because of this recession in the marketplace. And there was no leadership. And John was in a situation where the board was not happy, and where he was probably not long for it. And one thing I did not notice about John was his incredible survival instinct. Somebody once told me that this guy would not have become the president of PepsiCo without this kind of instinct.
And it was true. And John decided that a really good person to be the root of all these problems was me. And so we came to loggerheads. And John had cultivated a very close relationship with the board, and they believed him. So that's what happened. So they were competing with each other. What was your vision for the future of the company? Well, not so much competing with each other. John did not have any vision at all. I think I might ask, what was your vision for the future of the company? It wasn't a question of vision. It was an issue of execution. In the sense that I believed that Apple needed a stronger leadership to sort of unite these various factions to realize that the Macintosh is the future of Apple, that we need to make large investments in the Apple 2, that we need to spend very heavily in the Macintosh area.
Things like that. And John's vision was to remain the CEO of the company. And any decisions in that direction would be acceptable. So I think that Apple was in a state of paralysis in the early part of 1985. I wasn't at that time capable of running the company as a whole. I was 30 years old. I don't think I had enough experience to run a $2 billion company. Unfortunately, John didn't either. So anyway, I was told in no uncertain terms that there was no job for me.
It was really a tragedy. Siberia? Yeah. I think it would have been far smarter for Apple to put me on a new project. I would have volunteered. Why don't I start a research department? Give me a few million dollars a year, and we'll do the next project. And I was told there were no good specialists, and we'd make another excellent product. And I was told that I had no chance. I was taken away from the office. If I continue, I won't be able to contain my emotions. But that's irrelevant. I'm only one person, and I have a lot of people in the company. So that's not important. The important part was that the values of Apple over the next several years were systematically destroyed. I then asked Steve about the state of affairs at Apple. Remember, this was 1995, the year before he would go back to Apple.
Also, don't forget that when Apple bought Next a year after this interview, Steve immediately sold the shares of Apple that he had received as a result of the deal. Apple's dying today. Apple's dying during a painful death. It's on the rise. To die. And the reason for this is because, you know, when I walked out of Apple, we were ten years ahead of everyone in this industry. Macintosh was ten years ahead of everyone. We saw that Microsoft took ten years to catch up with it. Well, the reason that they catch up with it is because Apple was still in place. I mean, the Macintosh today is like 25% different than it was when I left. They've spent hundreds of millions of dollars a year on research and development. Probably five billion dollars.
What did they get? I don't know. But it was...
Transcribed from the audio with OpenAI Whisper. Timestamps link to the video above. Errors are possible.