Former CEO Sculley Says He Didn't Ruin Apple

Former Apple CEO John Sculley wants you to know that he didn't ruin Apple. It was a profitable company when he left in 1993, but many of its ideas were ahead of their time, Sculley told the BBC in an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

Sculley said he hasn't read Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, meanwhile, but the news stories written about the book seem to be accurate.

"It's ironic that neither Steve Jobs nor I have read the book, but I've seen interviews that Walter Isaacson has given and they seem to be very credible," he said. "I think he captured Steve in the really good greatness of him, and from what I've heard from people who have read the book [Isaacson] cleared up some of the myths—that I never really did fire Steve Jobs and that Apple was actually a very profitable company."

Sculley was at the helm of Apple from 1983-1993. Jobs left the company in 1985 after a disagreement with its board of directors, but he returned in 1997, thus bringing the company back from the brink of failure and introducing revolutionary products like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.

Now working as an advisor for various tech companies, Sculley told the BBC that when he left Apple, the company was in good shape. He claimed it wasn't until after he left that things went wrong.

"When I left Apple it had $2 billion of cash. It was the most profitable computer company in the world—not just personal computers—and Apple was the number one selling computer," he said. "So the myth that I fired Steve wasn't true and the myth that I destroyed Apple, that wasn't true either. A lot of things happened after I left before Steve came back."

Sculley also said that some of Apple's failures can be attributed to the fact that the ideas behind them were introduced too early. The 1985 failure of Macintosh Office was hard on Jobs, he said, and it led to a disagreement that prompted Jobs's dismissal. Jobs wanted to cut the price of the Macintosh, but Sculley said the company couldn't afford to do so and he wanted to focus on the Apple II to boost Apple's earnings.

"That's what led to the disagreement and the showdown between me and Steve and eventually the board investigated it and agreed that my position was the one they wanted to support," Sculley explained. "Ironically it was all about Moore's law and it wasn't about Steve and me. Computers just weren't powerful enough in 1985 to do the very rigorous graphics that you had to be able to do for laser printing, and ironically it was only 18 months later when computers were powerful enough that we renamed the Mac Office, Desktop Publishing and it became wildly successful."

He added: "It wasn't my idea, it was all Steve's stuff, but he was just a year and a half too early."

Sculley also opined that Apple's Newton came to the market prematurely.

"Newton was probably 15 years too early. I'm not a technologist. I didn't have the experience to make that judgement but we were I think right on many of the concepts," he said.

What about those ?

"I think that Apple has revolutionized every other consumer industry, why not television?" Sculley said. "The complexity of the experience of using the television gets more and more complicated. So it seems exactly the sort of problem that if anyone is going to change the experience of what the first principles are, it is going to be Apple."

Sculley was at CES representing Audax, a firm he described as the "first social health company."

Steve Jobs died on Oct. 5. For more, see , as well as our .