NEW YORK (TheStreet) — On a week filled with news of Apple Music and iOS 9 releases from Apple’s (AAPL – Get Report) at its 2015 worldwide developers conference, a former CEO said the company is able to look to the future, thanks to the foundation set by Steve Jobs.
Former CEO John Sculley reflected on his relationship with Jobs during his Apple tenure. Serving as CEO at Apple from the early 1980s through the early 1990s, Sculley recently wrote Moonshot!, a book about business leadership and opportunity. Sculley said he spent five months getting to know Steve Jobs.
Sculley said he was brought to Apple for his marketing skills (he had served as the CEO of Pepsi (PEP – Get Report) where he had launched the Pepsi Challenge) and so he could serve as Job’s partner while he developed the Macintosh. Sculley said that beyond being business colleagues, the two became good friends; Jobs was focused on building Apple and didn’t have time for many relationships.
Yet Sculley said their relationship soured after the introduction of Macintosh Office, which didn’t work very well.
Sculley maintained that Jobs was never fired from Apple but that members of the board asked him to step down. At that point in time, Jobs was a visionary but not a business leader, according to Sculley.
Saying that Jobs was a genius who always saw where the world was going and someone who grew to become a business leader, Sculley in his book credited changing technology (such as cloud computing, mobile and big data) for creating new transformative business opportunities.