Tuesday, February 27, 2007

The man who guided Apple Computer through its early glory years offered a group of Brown University entrepreneurs some advice, and anecdotes, and even some brutally honest self-criticism.

"I'm a terrible manager," said John Sculley, 67, a former chief executive officer of Apple Computer, who ran the company from 1983 until 1993. "But I'm a half-decent idea person, and so I try to match myself up with people who complement the areas I'm not particularly strong in."

Sculley heaped praise on Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, despite having ousted Jobs from the company in 1985.

"Real genius is seeing something that is totally obvious, maybe 20 years ahead of anybody else," Sculley said. "Steve Jobs would be a real example of that. Steve saw where all of this was going long before any of this existed."

"When I went to Apple -- and I take no credit for any of the vision at Apple, this was purely Steve Jobs' vision -- my job was to help bring big brand marketing to Silicon Valley" and to get people to think of a computer as something they needed.

Sculley and his team at Apple succeeded. During his 10-year tenure, Apple's sales rose from $1 billion a year to $10 billion. The company went from being a maker of a hobbyist's toy to a powerhouse in the desktop publishing industry that attained a near religious following among customers.

But what he didn't see coming, he said, was a new model for making and selling computers, pioneered by a student at a Texas university -- Michael Dell.

Dell undercut Apple's prices by building computers from easily attainable components. He sold them directly to customers, customized with the features they wanted.

"What we entirely missed -- my watch, I missed it -- was that someone else could innovate around the intangibles of the supply chain."

Apple was instead focusing on "cool stuff," such as the design of its computers, desktop publishing systems, and its new laptop computer.

Labels: Apple