Apple’s 30th anniversary is in the news these days and a lot has been written about the second coming of Steve Jobs and his saving Apple from what was certain demise in the mid 1990’s. But there is another person in Apple’s history that was extremely important in helping Apple become who they are today. That person is John Scully, Apple’s former CEO and the one who ousted Jobs in 1985. That split has also been widely documented in various books about Apple’s history so I won’t go into that part of Scully’s story at Apple here.
But, I don’t think you can underestimate Scully’s overall impact in guiding Apple during the 1980’s and how he helped shape Apple over those years.
Scully was hired, ironically, by Steve Jobs in 1983 and brought in to help give Apple more seasoned leadership as the company was set to grow rapidly during those early heydays of the PC industry. In fact, under Scully’s leadership, Apple got to as much as 18% market share and was a real force in the PC industry through 1991.
A former executive at Pepsi, Jobs challenged Scully to come to Apple and help them change the world. However, I am sure Scully did not realize what that meant at the time, but to his credit, once he become more familiar with technology and what it could do, he indeed began to think about changing the world.
I had the privilege of spending a lot of time with Scully and his team during those days and there is no question in my mind that he ended up becoming a real industry visionary.
Of course, not all of the ideas were his own, and in fact, Alan Kay, a former Xerox PARC executive, who is a true technology visionary and during that time was an Apple Fellow, was perhaps the most influential person that helped shape Scully’s thinking during that period.
From 1985 until Scully was ousted himself by the board in 1992, Scully helped introduce three key products that dramatically shaped the PC world’s future.
The first was desktop publishing. In 1983, I had written a report on laser printers, which at that time filled up half of a room and were in the $50,000 prince range. But early in 1983, Canon showed me their first small laser printer engine that could fit into a very small form factor and that lead me to write in this report that “someday, we could see people actually publishing their own documents at their desktop.”
Apple saw this report and asked me about a concept they were working on called desktop publishing. Scully was shown a new piece of software called Pagemaker by Paul Brianard, the CEO of Aldus and he was mulling around the idea of using it to push what became Apple’s initial foray into desktop publishing. As you know, desktop publishing put Apple on the map back then and started their ascent into the offices of graphics designers, publishers, etc, and eventually, took word processing and gave it the ability to blend words and graphics into mainstream documents. To be fair, this was made possible by a decision that Steve Jobs made before he left. He was the one who decided that Apple should sell a laser printer, and perhaps his most important decision was to support Postscript. But it was Scully’s marketing prowess and vision that married Pagemaker and their laser printer that made desktop publishing a household word and increased Apple’s fortunes dramatically in the 1980’s.
The second thing he introduced was multimedia computing. His decision to include a CD ROM in Mac’s at the time was revolutionary. More importantly, it laid the groundwork for integrating not only text and graphics, but also moving images (video) and music into a computer generated presentation. The impact of blending all of these technologies into the computer cannot be underestimated when it comes to its impact on the overall PC market. In fact, from that point on, the PC became more then just a business tool and even started finding its way into consumer’s homes. Apple showed the world what multimedia computing was about and again Scully’s influence and marketing prowess had a deep impact on the PC industry.
The third thing he brought to market was the Newton Message Pad. Although this was not a success, its impact is significant. Before he introduced Newton, or more specifically, the concept of a PDA, nobody even knew what a personal digital assistant was or could be. In fact, the public’s interest, as well as scrutiny, in the Newton led to Palms PDA and many other devices, including today’s smart phones, which can all trace their history back to Newton and Scully’s concept of a PDA.
Unfortunately for Scully, his fascination with Newton as well as his desire to be more visionary at a time when Apple needed to buckle down and innovate around the Mac platform caused his demise and he was pushed out in 1992.
While it is important to applaud Steve Job’s role in turning Apple around, it is also important to keep in perspective the fact that Scully kept Apple moving ahead in the 1980’s and without his push in desktop publishing, multimedia computing and even PDA’s, Apple might not have even been worth saving by the time Steve Jobs got a chance to make Apple great again.