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发帖数: 2053 | 1 http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the-full-interview-transcript/63295?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+cultofmac/bFow+%28Cult+of+Mac%29
By Leander Kahney (2:59 am, Oct. 14, 2010)
Here’s a full transcript of the interview with John Sculley on the subject
of Steve Jobs.
It’s long but worth reading because there are some awesome insights into
how Jobs does things.
It’s also one of the frankest CEO interviews you’ll ever read. Sculley
talks openly about Jobs and Apple, admits it was a mistake to hire him to
run the company and that he knows little about computers. It’s rare for
anyone, never mind a big-time CEO, to make such frank assessment of their
career in public.
UPDATE: Here’s an audio version of the entire interview made by reader Rick
Mansfield using OS X’s text-to-speech system. It’s a bit robotic (Rick
used the “Alex” voice, which he says is “more than tolerable to listen to
”) but you might enjoy it while commuting or at the gym. The audio is 52
minutes long and it’s a 45MB download. It’s in .m4a format, which will
play on any iPod/iPhone, etc. Download it here (Option-Click the link; or
right-click and choose “Save Linked File…”).
Q: You talk about the “Steve Jobs methodology.” What is Steve’s
methodology?
Sculley: Let me give you a framework. The time that I first met Jobs, which
was over 25 years ago, he was putting together the same first principles
that I call the Steve Jobs methodology of how to build great products.
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.
I didn’t know really anything about computers nor did any other people in
the world at that time. This was at the beginning of the personal computer
revolution, but we both believed in beautiful design and Steve in particular
felt that you had to begin design from the vantage point of the experience
of the user.
He always looked at things from the perspective of what was the user’s
experience going to be? But unlike a lot of people in product marketing in
those days, who would go out and do consumer testing, asking people, “What
did they want?” Steve didn’t believe in that.
He said, “How can I possibly ask somebody what a graphics-based computer
ought to be when they have no idea what a graphic based computer is? No one
has ever seen one before.” He believed that showing someone a calculator,
for example, would not give them any indication as to where the computer was
going to go because it was just too big a leap.
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. And he recruited me to Apple because he believed that the
computer was eventually going to become a consumer product. That was an
outrageous idea back in the early 1980′s because people thought that
personal computers were just smaller versions of bigger computers. That’s
how IBM looked at it.
Some of them thought it was more like a game machine because there were
early game machines, which were very simple and played on televisions… But
Steve was thinking about something entirely different. He felt that the
computer was going to change the world and it it was going to become what he
called “the bicycle for the mind.” It would enable individuals to have
this incredible capability that they never dreamed of before. It was not
about game machines. It was not about big computers getting smaller…
He was a person of huge vision. But he was also a person that believed in
the precise detail of every step. He was methodical and careful about
everything — a perfectionist to the end.
If you go back to the Apple II, Steve was the first one to put a computer
into a plastic case, which was called ABS plastic in those days, and
actually put the keyboard into the computer. It seems like a pretty simple
idea today, looking back at it, but even at the time when he created the
first Apple II, in 1977 — that was the beginning of the Jobs methodology.
And it showed up in the Macintosh and showed up with his NeXT computer. And
it showed up with the future Macs, the iMacs, the iPods and the iPhones.
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 that 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. The same
thing was true with Apple. Here’s someone who starts with the user
experience, who believes that industrial design shouldn’t be compared to
what other people were doing with technology products but it should be
compared to people were doing with jewelry… Go back to my lock example, and
hinges and a door with beautiful brass, finely machined, mechanical devices
. And I think that reflects everything that I have ever seen that Steve has
touched.
When I first saw the Macintosh — it was in the process of being created —
it was basically just a series of components over what is called a bread
board. It wasn’t anything, but Steve had this ability to reach out to find
the absolute best, smartest people he felt were out there. He was extremely
charismatic and extremely compelling in getting people to join up with him
and he got people to believe in his visions even before the products existed
. When I met the Mac team, which eventually got to 100 people but the time I
met him it was much smaller, the average age was 22.
These were people who had clearly never built a commercial product before
but they believed in Steve and they believed in his vision. He was able to
work in multiple levels in parallel.
On one level he is working at the “change the world,” the big concept. At
the other level he is working down at the details of what it takes to
actually build a product and design the software, the hardware, the systems
design and eventually the applications, the peripheral products that connect
to it.
In each case, he always reached out for the very best people he could find
in the field. And he personally did all the recruiting for his team. He
never delegated that to anybody else.
The other thing about Steve was that he did not respect large organizations.
He felt that they were bureaucratic and ineffective. He would basically
call them “bozos.” That was his term for organizations that he didn’t
respect.
The Mac team they were all in one building and they eventually got to one
hundred people. Steve had a rule that there could never be more than one
hundred people on the Mac team. So if you wanted to add someone you had to
take someone out. And the thinking was a typical Steve Jobs observation: “I
can’t remember more than a hundred first names so I only want to be around
people that I know personally. So if it gets bigger than a hundred people,
it will force us to go to a different organization structure where I can’t
work that way. The way I like to work is where I touch everything.” Through
the whole time I knew him at Apple that’s exactly how he ran his division.
Q: So how did he cope when Apple became bigger? I mean, Apple has tens of
thousands of people now.
Sculley: Steve would say: “The organization can become bigger but not the
Mac team. The Macintosh was set up as a product development division — and
so Apple had a central sales organization, a central back office for all the
administration, legal. It had a centralized manufacturing of that sort but
the actual team that was building the product, and this is true for high
tech products, it doesn’t take a lot of people to build a great product.
Normally you will only see a handful of software engineers who are building
an operating system. People think that it must be hundreds and hundreds
working on an operating system. It really isn’t. It’s really just a small
team of people. Think of it like the atelier of an artist. It’s like an
artist’s workshop and Steve is the master craftsman who walks around and
looks at the work and makes judgments on it and in many cases his judgments
were to reject something.
I can remember lots of evenings we would be there until 12 or 1 o’clock in
the morning because the engineers usually don’t show up until lunchtime and
they work well into the night. And an engineer would bring Steve in and
show him the latest software code that he’s written. Steve would look at it
and throw it back at him and say: “It’s just not good enough.” And he
was constantly forcing people to raise their expectations of what they could
do. So people were producing work that they never thought they were capable
of. Largely because Steve would shift between being highly charismatic and
motivating and getting them excited to feel like they are part of something
insanely great. And on the other hand he would be almost merciless in terms
of rejecting their work until he felt it had reached the level of perfection
that was good enough to go into – in this case, the Macintosh.
Q: He was quite conscious about that, right? This was very well thought out,
not just crazy capriciousness?
Sculley: No, Steve was incredibly methodical. He always had a white board in
his office. He did not draw himself. He didn’t have particular drawing
ability himself, yet he had an incredible taste.
The thing that separated Steve Jobs from other people like Bill Gates —
Bill was brilliant too — but Bill was never interested in great taste. He
was always interested in being able to dominate a market. He would put out
whatever he had to put out there to own that space. Steve would never do
that. Steve believed in perfection. Steve was willing to take extraordinary
chances in trying new product areas but it was always from the vantage point
of being a designer. So when I think about different kinds of CEOs — CEOs
who are great leaders, CEOs who are great turnaround artists, great deal
negotiators, great people motivators — but the great skill that Steve has
is he’s a great designer. Everything at Apple can be best understood
through the lens of designing.
Whether it’s designing the look and feel of the user experience, or the
industrial design, or the system design and even things like how the boards
were laid out. The boards had to be beautiful in Steve’s eyes when you
looked at them, even though when he created the Macintosh he made it
impossible for a consumer to get in the box because he didn’t want people
tampering with anything.
In his level of perfection, everything had to be beautifully designed even
if it wasn’t going to be seen by most people.
That went all the way through to the systems when he built the Macintosh
factory. It was supposed to be the first automated factory but what it
really was a final assembly and test factory with a pick-to-pack robotic
automation. It is not as novel today as it was 25 years ago, but I can
remember when the CEO of General Motors along with Ross Perot came out just
to look at the Macintosh factory. All we were doing was final assembly and
test but it was done so beautifully. It was as well thought through in
design as a factory, a lights out factory requiring many people as the
products were.
Now if you leap forward and look at the products that Steve builds today,
today the technology is far more capable of doing things, it can be
miniaturized, it is commoditized, it is inexpensive. And Apple no longer
builds any products. When I was there, people used to call Apple “a
vertically-integrated advertising agency,” which was not a compliment.
Actually today, that’s what everybody is. That’s what HP is; that’s what
Apple is; and that’s what most companies are because they outsource to EMS
— electronics manufacturing services.
Q: Isn’t Nike a good analogy?
Sculley: Yeah, probably, Nike is closer, I think that is true. I think if
you look at the Japanese consumer electronics in that era they were all
analog companies.
The one that Steve admired was Sony. We used to go visit Akio Morita and he
had really the same kind of high-end standards that Steve did and respect
for beautiful products. I remember Akio Morita gave Steve and me each one of
the first Sony Walkmans. None of us had ever seen anything like that before
because there had never been a product like that. This is 25 years ago and
Steve was fascinated by it. The first thing he did with his was take it
apart and he looked at every single part. How the fit and finish was done,
how it was built.
He was fascinated by the Sony factories. We went through them. They would
have different people in different colored uniforms. Some would have red
uniforms, some green, some blue, depending on what their functions were. It
was all carefully thought out and the factories were spotless. Those things
made a huge impression on him.
The Mac factory was exactly like that. They didn’t have colored uniforms,
but it was every bit as elegant as the early Sony factories that we saw.
Steve’s point of reference was Sony at the time. He really wanted to be
Sony. He didn’t want to be IBM. He didn’t want to be Microsoft. He wanted
to be Sony.
The challenge was in that era you couldn’t build digital products like Sony
. Everything was analog and the Japanese companies approached things and you
can read Prahalad’s book, from University of Michigan, he studied it. (
Note: Sculley is referring to C.K. Prahalad’s “Competing for the Future”
(1994))
The Japanese always started with the market share of components first. So
one would dominate, let’s say sensors and someone else would dominate
memory and someone else hard drive and things of that sort. They would then
build up their market strengths with components and then they would work
towards the final product. That was fine with analog electronics where you
are trying to focus on cost reduction — and whoever controlled the key
component costs was at an advantage. It didn’t work at all for digital
electronics because digital electronics you’re starting at the wrong end of
the value chain. You are not starting with the components. You are starting
with the user experience.
And you can see today the tremendous problem Sony has had for at least the
last 15 years as the digital consumer electronics industry has emerged. They
have been totally stove-piped in their organization. The software people
don’t talk to the hardware people, who don’t talk to the component people,
who don’t talk to the design people. They argue between their
organizations and they are big and bureaucratic.
Sony should have had the iPod but they didn’t — it was Apple. The iPod is
a perfect example of Steve’s methodology of starting with the user and
looking at the entire end-to-end system.
It was always an end-to-end system with Steve. He was not a designer but a
great systems thinker. That is something you don’t see with other companies
. They tend to focus on their piece and outsource everything else.
If you look at the state of the iPod, the supply chain going all the way
over to iPod city in China – it is as sophisticated as the design of the
product itself. The same standards of perfection are just as challenging for
the supply chain as they are for the user design. It is an entirely
different way of looking at things.
Q: Where did he get the idea for controlling the whole widget? The idea to
be in charge of everything, the whole system?
Sculley: Steve believed that if you opened the system up people would start
to make little changes and those changes would be compromises in the
experience and he would not be able to deliver the kind of experience that
he wanted.
Q: But this control extends to every aspect of the product – even to
opening the box. The experience of opening the box is designed by Steve Jobs.
Sculley: The original Mac really had no operating system. People keep saying
, “Well why didn’t we license the operating system?” The simple answer is
that there wasn’t one. It was all done with lots of tricks with hardware
and software. Microprocessors in those days were so weak compared to what we
had today. In order to do graphics on a screen you had to consume all of
the power of the processor. Then you had to glue chips all around it to
enable you to offload other functions. Then you had to put what are called
“calls to ROM.” There were 400 calls to ROM, which were all the little
subroutines that had to be offloaded into the ROM because there was no way
you could run these in real time. All these things were neatly held together
. It was totally remarkable that you could deliver a machine when you think
the first processor on the Mac was less than three MIPs (Million
Instructions Per Second), which today would be — I can’t think of any
device which has three MIPS, or equivalent. Even your digital watch is at
least 200 or 300 times more powerful than the first Macintosh. (NOTE. For
comparison, today’s entry-level iMac uses an Intel Core i3 chip, rated at
over 40,000 MIPS!)
It’s hard to conceive how he was able to accomplish so much with so little
in those days. So for someone to build consumer products in the 1980s beyond
what we did with the first Mac was literally impossible. In the 1990s with
Moore’s Law and other things, the homogenization of technology, it became
possible to begin to see what consumer products would look like but you
couldn’t really build them. It really hasn’t been until the turn of the
century that you sort of got the crossover between the cost of components,
the commoditization and the miniaturization that you need for consumer
products. The performance suddenly reached the point where you could
actually build things that we can call digital consumer products. Because
Steve’s design methodology was so correct even 25 years ago he was able to
make a design methodology – his first principles — of user experience,
focus on just a few things, look at the system, never compromise, compare
yourself not to other electronic products but compare yourself to the finest
pieces of jewelry — all those criteria — no one else was thinking about
that. Everyone else was just going through an evolution of cheap products
that are getting more powerful and cheaper to build. Like the MP3 player.
Remember when he came in with the iPod, there were thousands of MP3 players
out there. Can anyone else remember any of the others?
His tradeoff was he believed that he had to control the entire system. He
made every decision. The boxes were locked.
Q: But the motivation for this is the user experience?
Sculley: Absolutely. The user experience has to go through the whole end-to-
end system, whether it’s desktop publishing or iTunes. It is all part of
the end-to-end system. It is also the manufacturing. The supply chain. The
marketing. The stores. I remember I was brought in because I had a design
background and because I was a marketer. I had product marketing experience.
Not because I knew anything about computers.
Q: I find that pretty fascinating. You say in your book that first and
foremost you wanted to make Apple a “product marketing company.”
Sculley: Right. Steve and I spent months getting to know each other before I
joined Apple. He had no exposure to marketing other than what he picked up
on his own. This is sort of typical of Steve. When he knows something is
going to be important he tries to absorb as much as he possibly can.
One of the things that fascinated him: I described to him that there’s not
much difference between a Pepsi and a Coke, but we were outsold 9 to 1. Our
job was to convince people that Pepsi was a big enough decision that they
ought to pay attention |
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