Dave Winer (who really should know better):
Graham uses Steve Jobs as an example. He knew what was and wasn't an Apple product. A hired CEO would have to have that explained to him. Sculley, who Graham cites, is a perfectly nice person in my experience, had no idea how to deal with Windows. Very different from a consumer product like fizzy waterSculley ultimately ran out of steam, but in the time he was at Apple he also took it from an $800m company to an $8bn one. Meanwhile, Jobs was back in founder mode at NeXT where, having taken some of Apple’s best people with him, he created a computer that no one wanted to buy and an operating system that remarkably few people installed.
The Steve Jobs who went back to Apple was a different person from the one that left it, chastened by the experience of business failure. It’s an interesting question of parallel history but my thought is that had Jobs won the battle and remained CEO rather than Sculley, the kind of mistakes that he made with NeXT would have probably lead to Apple suffering the same fate as most of the early computer makers who didn’t move to DOS/Windows.
