VOL 45: Apple Inc. History; How Steve Jobs Got Fired From Apple-7
Hey Friends 🤓,
Trust you all had a great week 🤗?
This is the 7th post in a blog series on Apple Inc. History. Our comprehensive history of Apple will take you from its humble beginnings in the 1970s to Jobs' departure and subsequent return to Apple. Join us in following the Apple story!
Today at a Glance:
Quote of the Week
Wozniak Leaves Apple
John Sculley
How Steve Jobs Got Fired From Apple
Past Greats 👴
Business & Startups
Random Facts
Tweet of the Week
Quote of The Week
“In this age, we have always been refining and distilling ideas, we don't mine ideas anymore.
This is what I know and the reason why I think we've peaked, but I know we’ve not”
— — —
Unknown
Wozniak Leaves Apple
On February 6, 1985, co-founder Steve Wozniak leaves Apple to pursue outside interests, he was dissatisfied with the company's shifting priorities.
His departure, which coincides with Steve Jobs' departure from Apple to form NeXT, represents a significant shift for the company. It is the result of Woz's dissatisfaction with how the Apple II division is being treated, as well as his desire to start a new company.
Wozniak continues to represent Apple at events and in interviews as of January 2018, receiving a stipend for this role that was estimated in 2006 to be $120,000 per year.
John Sculley
It’s all been good news so far in our chronicle of Apple's founding and early development. We're still in the mid-1980s. The company is still young, but it is growing and providing serious competition to its larger, more established competitors. Few would have predicted that trouble was on the way.
To explain what happened next, we need to step back a few months and look at the company structure.
Steve Jobs was Apple's public face and co-founder, but he was not the company's CEO in the mid-1980s. He hadn't yet turned 30, and many on the board thought he was too young for the job, so they hired Michael Scott first, and then Mark Markkula, who had retired at 32 thanks to stock options he'd earned at Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. Markkula was one of Apple's early investors, but he didn't want to be in charge of the company in the long run.
When he announced his intention to return to retirement, the company immediately set out to find a replacement. It eventually settled on John Sculley, whom Jobs famously enticed away from Pepsi by asking, "Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?" Or do you want to join me in changing the world?'
Their management styles, on the other hand, were radically different, and it was perhaps unavoidable that the two men would clash. Sculley was unhappy with Jobs' treatment of other employees, and the two clashed over more practical issues, such as Macintosh pricing.
The Macintosh was always intended to be a computer for the rest of us, reasonably priced so that it would sell in large numbers. The initial goal was to produce a $1000 machine, but as the project grew more ambitious, the price nearly doubled.
Shortly before its launch, it was slated to go on sale at $1,995, but Sculley could see that even this wasn’t enough and he decreed that it would have to be hiked by another $500. Jobs disagreed, but Sculley won, and the Macintosh 128K went on sale for $2,495.
How Steve Jobs Got Fired From Apple
By early 1985, Macintosh's failure to defeat the IBM PC became clear. Leading to more power struggles between Steve Jobs and CEO John Sculley.
That was just the beginning of their feud, which was exacerbated by the company's financial difficulties. Sales of the Macintosh began to decline, the Lisa was discontinued, and Jobs made it clear that his initial admiration for Sculley had waned.
Sculley decided to remove Jobs as general manager of the Macintosh division in April 1985, with unanimous support from the Apple board of directors. Rather than bowing to Sculley's authority, Jobs attempted to depose him as Apple's CEO.
That May, Sculley had to leave the country on business, and Jobs saw this as an ideal opportunity to reclaim control of the company. He confided in senior members of his own team, which included Jean-Louis Gassée, who was being groomed to succeed Jobs on the Macintosh team at the time. Sculley cancelled his trip after Gassée informed him of the situation.
Sculley confronted Jobs in front of the entire board the next morning, asking if the rumours were true. Jobs stated that they were, and Sculley once again asked the board to choose between him and Jobs. They sided with Sculley once more, and Jobs' fate was sealed, he was stripped of all operational duties.
Jobs had no influence over Apple's direction and resigned from Apple in September 1985, taking a number of capable Apple employees with him to found NeXT Inc. Jobs sold all but one of his 6.5 million shares in Apple Computer for $70 million in a show of defiance against being sidelined by the company.
The reason behind this historical perspective is that I want to educate people who have no computer background about the history and development of what has gone before and where we are today.
We’ll continue from here next week.
ROSA LUXEMBURG (1871 –1919)
A Polish and naturalized-German revolutionary socialist, Spartacist, Marxist philosopher and anti-war activist. Successively, she was a member of the Proletariat party.
As a Jew, she was very much treated as a second-class citizen in Russian-occupied Poland. Yet despite those barriers, she went on to become one of the very few women at the time to gain a doctorate at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.
Luxemburg is best known for her contributions to some of the most important economic and political debates in the history of socialist thought. She was a critic of capitalism and capital accumulation dynamics, the evolution of globalization and its relationship to colonialism and imperialism, the limits of national self-determination, the relationship of revolution to democracy, and so on.
Luxemburg was jailed multiple times throughout her life for her ideas, including her opposition to WWI; she believed that the generals responsible should have been tried for war crimes. Although she was inspired by Marxism, she was also one of its most outspoken critics.
She was also a Democrat. She believed in freedom of the press and freedom of assembly. She defended freedom, understood as a form of individual and collective self-rule, which could only be fully realized in a democratic socialist society, and gave her life for the cause.
Rosa Luxemburg was murdered at the age of 47 by the Freikorps, a right-wing militia that sprung up amid the social and political unrest that followed the end of WWI
Business & Startups
Quidax is a Nigerian startup that makes it simple to buy, sell, store, and transfer cryptocurrencies.
The company was recently listed on CoinMarketCap, one of the world’s leading sources of cryptocurrency-related market data, becoming the first fully African-owned crypto exchange to be listed on CoinMarketCap.
Since the launch of the platform in 2018, it touts to have achieved significant milestones including over $3.2 billion in transactions in less than 3 years of operation.
Random Tech Facts
The QWERTY keyboard was explicitly designed to slow typing.
Tweet of The Week
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