John Sculley
John Sculley ( born April 9, 1939 in New York City ) is an American manager. He was vice - president of Pepsi Cola USA and 1983-1993 President and CEO of Apple Computer. Sculley holds a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Architecture from Brown University and a Master of Business Administration ( MBA) from the Wharton School.
Life
John Sculley was impressed at an early age from the electronics. At the age of 14, he invented a picture tube for color television. His patent application was rejected because a scientist had announced a few weeks before him exactly this principle to the patent. Its patent later formed the basis for the Trinitron tube from Sony.
At the request of his father, Donald M. Kendall, president of Pepsi Cola, Sculley joined the company PepsiCo. He went through the company and was last famous as marketing head by two lifestyle advertising campaigns: "The choice of a new generation" and " Pepsi Challenge". She brought him a reputation as a marketing genius, and led PepsiCo against Coca -Cola at number one in the soft drinks.
The expanding company Apple was looking at that time desperately looking for a CEO. In November 1982, Sculley got a call from Gerry Roche, a recruiter commissioned by Apple. Sculley rejected a switch to Apple from first. During the next few months, however, he met with the Apple company founder Steve Jobs for informal talks, and between the two became friends. Sculley passion for electronics began to flourish again. In particular, the projects Lisa and Macintosh fascinated him. But Sculley remained undecided until Steve Jobs it with high financial bids and the sentence was " Do you want the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want to take the chance to change the world? " Convince, but to work for Apple.
Sculley succeeded at first everything Apple. He was responsible for the introduction of the Macintosh, and refused to grant licenses to clone manufacturers. Under his leadership, Apple developed many pioneering products, so the LaserWriter, the HyperCard multimedia program, the network protocol AppleTalk, the portable Macintosh Portable and the Apple PowerBook, System 7, the Newton and the Apple Power Macintosh. Under his leadership, Apple's sales increased from 600 million to 8 billion dollars per year. The power struggle between him and Steve Jobs, he decided in 1985 for himself why Jobs left Apple and founded NeXT.
In a Playboy interview in 1987 Sculley met some now famous predictions. He said a manned space flight to Mars ahead of the USSR and the importance of optical storage media ( CD -ROM) for the use of the computer. Some of his ideas for the Knowledge Navigator were not implemented by Apple itself, but on the Internet and the World Wide Web.
At Apple, the Sculley era was marked by market segmentation and their further subdivision. Many nearly identical products were positioned under different names in the three main markets - private clients, educational institutions and corporate customers. This marketing strategy has resulted in high production and marketing costs and uncertainty among potential buyers. The unnecessary variety of products and falling profits led the Apple Board to dismiss Sculley. In 1993, he was replaced by Michael Spindler on the board. Sculley then went into politics to support Bill Clinton in the presidential elections. He runs a private investment firm today.