[(( p g ))]

Noticed this in today's news. John Sculley claims his biggest mistake during his tenure at Apple was that he didn't steer the company to Intel chips. I would have thought that his biggest regret would have been how he mismanaged the company almost to the point of bankruptcy...

 

[imactheknife]

haha, the guy is just bitter because Steve Jobs has turned the company around and has been succesful at it..where scully (reminds me of xfiles for some reason

) was not a good ceo for apple...and the nasty thing is...if Apple would have gone intel back then..right now Apple would be competing with Gateway, HP, and Smelly dell...and it would have made the company just an average computer maker...I really think he is bitter about his JOB loss

wonder what he really thinks of Apple now and the horsepower potential of the PowerPC 970 (980 etc) and the road Apple/IBM plan to go!..up yours scully! glad your gone to join the ranks of the evil winblows camp..and may your ventures be as sucessful as your time with Apple..

 

[JAMG]

What's next... Brian Mulrooney coming back to say Canada should have become Americans...

Sculley's time heading Apple had one lasting legacy...

When he left, a lot of the chatter about Apple's immenent demise ended...

I read that he now works for a company calle Sculley Bros. LLC, hmmmm, guess you can always work for family... if you have to...

 

[gordguide]

Scully is a strange bird, no doubt about it. Some things to keep in mind:

What if Apple had used x86 instead of PPC?
Hardware at commodity prices/components:
No Apple hardware division. There's no way Apple could have offered extra value in hardware and made any meaningful difference in price versus the Compaqs and Dells of the world, because even $100 is a vast gulf in the PC market.

Even if they did offer higher value hardware on x86, what possible business advantage would result? The Sonys and AlienWare's of the world today do not have marketshare that compares with Apple's current position.

It might be worthwhile to remind those who would give Scully an ear that he almost suceeded in destroying the Apple hardware division, even without x86 in the box. I suppose if he had prevailed, it just wouldn't have taken as long, making the Jobs era moot (too little, too late). Under his helm, the clone era saw Apple's marketshare fall from 10% to 3% in two years; a level that the company is still recovering from. Thanks, John.

Alternately, they could have adopted an archtitecture identical to PCs. Result: No Apple software division. Who would buy "extra" software when Windows apps do mostly the same thing? What developer would continue with MacOS version development when they could simply convince Mac users to adopt Windows instead? Remember, it was business users, mostly accountants used to DOS, who drove the adoption of Windows over MacOS at the corporate/small business level, and it was business adoption that drove the home adoption.

Sounds like Scully's wise musings are good justification for getting him out before he finished the job he started. In either of the above scenarios, I don't see Apple emerging as an $8 billion-a-year company, although I suppose there might be more profit for shareholders (which is what he's really advocating, because he's a bean-counter and always has been. He doesn't care a whit about the company or the computer industry itself).

Hey John! How come Pepsi didn't want you back? Could it be because they make more money than Coke, but it took your leaving for it to happen? See ya'.

[ October 09, 2003, 05:19 PM: Message edited by: gordguide ]