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Former Apple CEO John Sculley: "It's Apple's game to lose"

9to5 Staff | Jun 17 2011 - 4:13 am PT

Steve Jobs lured John Sculley away from Pepsi to work as Apple’s CEO in the 1980s with the now famous line: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?” Sculley took the job immediately. “It was like someone just knocked wind out of my stomach”, he would say decades later. However, he would later earn notoriety for helping fire Jobs after an attempted boardroom coup in 1985. Today, Sculley is lavishing praise on Apple’s boss.

Though the board had later kicked Sculley out of the picture over market share loss due to cheap Windows PCs taking over, plummeting sales and a series of missed deadlines, he partially takes credit today for Apple’s experience focused success. In an exclusive interview with Electricpig, Sculley says:

Steve and I hit it off because he believed computers would eventually need to be sold like packaged goods. I said, Steve, let’s sell the experience of a lifestyle. It was always about selling the experience and that was what interested Steve. If you look at Apple today everything is sold on experience.

He also talked about the differences between Apple and Microsoft and credited Steve for single-handedly launching the mobile revolution:

Now we’re in a new era, mobile, and it was launched by one person, Steve Jobs. It took two years for the iPhone, it took one year for the iPad. There’s never been anything like that. The speed of adoption in this mobile era is totally unprecedented. When the iPad 2 came out and all the Android tablets came out, Apple actually ended up even further ahead. It’s Apple’s game to lose.