John Sculley

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John Sculley
Born	April 6, 1939 (1939-04-06) (age 69)
Occupation	President of PepsiCo (1977-1983) CEO of Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) (1983-1993) Partner at Sculley Brothers, LLC (1995-Present)

John Sculley (born April 6, 1939) is an American businessman. Sculley was vice-president (1970-1977) and president of PepsiCo (1977-1983), until he became CEO of Apple on April 8, 1983, a position he held until leaving in 1993. Sculley is currently a partner in Sculley Brothers, a private investment firm formed in 1995. He is best known for his marketing skills, particularly in his introduction of 'the Pepsi Challenge' at PepsiCo, which allowed the company to gain market share from its primary rival, Coca Cola. Sculley used similar marketing strategies at Apple throughout the 1980s and 1990s to mass market Macintosh personal computers. In May 1987, Sculley was named Silicon Valley's top-paid executive, with an annual salary of US$2.2M. ^[1]

Contents 1 Background and personal life 2 1967–82: Sculley at Pepsi-Cola 3 1983–93: the Sculley era at Apple 4 1994–present: after Apple 5 Footnotes 6 References 7 External links

[edit] Background and personal life

Sculley was born in the United States, but within a week of his birth, he and his family were relocated to Bermuda, and subsequently to Brazil and Europe.^[2]

Sculley attended high school at St. Mark's School in Southborough, MA. He ultimately received a bachelor's degree in architectural design from Brown University and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business. ^[3]

Sculley has two brothers, Arthur and David Sculley, with whom he formed a private investment firm, Sculley Brothers LLC, in 1995.^[2]

[edit] 1967–82: Sculley at Pepsi-Cola

Sculley joined the Pepsi-Cola division of PepsiCo in 1967 as a trainee, where he participated in a six-month training program at a bottling plant in Pittsburgh. ^[4] In 1970, at the age of 30, Sculley became the company's youngest marketing vice-president.

As vice-president of marketing at Pepsi, Sculley initiated one of the company's first consumer-research studies, an extended in-home product test in which 350 families participated. As a result of the research, Pepsi decided to launch new, larger and more varied packages of their soft drinks. ^[5] In 1970, Pepsi set out to dethrone Coca Cola as the market leader of the industry, in what would eventually become known as the Cola Wars.

Pepsi began spending more on marketing and advertising, typically paying between US$200,000 and $300,000 for each television spot, while most companies spent between $15,000 and $75,000. With the Pepsi Generation campaign, Pepsi aimed to overturn Coca Cola's classic marketing. ^[6]

At Pepsi, Sculley also took the position of managing PepsiCo's International Food Operations division, shortly after he visited a failing potato-chip factory in Paris. PepsiCo's Food division was their only money-losing division, with revenues of US$83 million and losses of $16 million. To make the food division profitable, Sculley hired new managers from Frito-Lay and improved product quality, as well as improving accounts and establishing financial controls. ^[7] Within three years, the food division was making US$300 million in revenues and $40 million in profit. ^[8]

Sculley is best known at Pepsi for the Pepsi Challenge, an advertising campaign he started in 1975 to compete against Coca Cola to gain market share, using heavily-advertised taste tests. It claimed based on Sculley's own research that Pepsi-Cola tasted better than Coca-Cola. The Pepsi Challenge included a series of television advertisements that first aired in the early 1970s, featuring lifelong Coca-Cola drinkers participating in blind taste tests. Pepsi's soft drink was always chosen as the preferred product by the participant; however, these tests have been criticized as being biased. The Pepsi Challenge was mostly targeted at the Texas market, because Pepsi had a significantly low market share there at the time. The campaign was successful, significantly increasing Pepsi's market share in that state. At the time the Pepsi Challenge was started, Sculley was senior vice-president of United States sales and marketing operations at Pepsi.^[9]

A slightly humorous fact is that Sculley himself took the taste test and picked Coke instead of Pepsi.^[10]

In 1977, Sculley was named Pepsi's youngest-ever president.

[edit] 1983–93: the Sculley era at Apple

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While chairman of Apple Computer, Steve Jobs recruited Sculley from Pepsi. Jobs is reputed to have asked Sculley:

Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?^[11]

Apple chose Sculley because they wanted him to apply his marketing skills to the personal computer market, particularly to the Macintosh.^{[citation needed]}

Sculley raised the initial price of the Macintosh to $2,495 from the originally planned $1,995, using the additional money for higher profit margins and expensive advertising campaigns. ^[12]

The Lisa shipped, and had disastrous sales. While the Macintosh shipped and sold extremely well, it did not put the IBM PC out of business, and some of the privileges of the elite development groups were trimmed, and projects were subject to stricter review for usefulness, marketability, feasibility, and reasonable cost. A power struggle between Jobs and Sculley had become readily apparent. Jobs became "non-linear": he kept meetings running past midnight, sent out lengthy faxes, then called new meetings at 7 am. After one such meeting in 1985, the Board of Directors lost patience and stripped Jobs of all operational responsibilities, three months after Jobs' 30th birthday.^{[citation needed]}

Microsoft threatened to discontinue Microsoft Office for the Macintosh if Apple did not license parts of the Macintosh graphical user interface to use in the Windows operating system. Under pressure, Sculley agreed, a decision which later affected the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit. Also while at Apple, Sculley coined the term personal digital assistant (PDA) referring to the Apple Newton, one of the world's first PDAs. ^[13]

In 1987, Sculley published his autobiography, Odyssey. As a benevolent gesture, he gave each Apple employee a copy at Apple's expense, in the hope of inspiring "excellence". Shortly afterwards, Jean-Louis Gassée, Vice President of Product Development, gave each employee in his division a copy of Fred Brooks's book The Mythical Man Month, in the hope of inspiring good sense in planning and carrying out engineering projects.^{[citation needed]}

The "Sculley Era" at Apple was characterized by market division and further subdivision, with a large number of models covering what critics called a too-finely subdivided range. Each production model was marketed under different names in each of several primary markets — home, education, and business; with time, each of these models generated upgrades and variations, which created unforeseen incompatibilities: keeping the operating system (The Macintosh System Software) compatible with all Macintosh models was a never-ending task. This strategy backfired, as it resulted in high engineering, manufacturing, and marketing costs, as well as market confusion. Buyers would look at similar machines in a store, each conceived for a particular market but usable elsewhere, and with comparable performance specifications, and become confused as to which product to buy. Too many products with similar specifications led to decreased profits, despite high gross margins.^{[citation needed]}

Given his apparent inability to effectively manage Apple's product line, Apple's board ultimately forced Sculley out. He was replaced by Michael Spindler, who had been Chief Operating Officer.^{[citation needed]}

Another side effect of Sculley's tenure was the destruction of Apple's engineering department. As the company grew, mid- and low-level managers within the company found it fairly easy to gain funding for practically any project. Apple became filled with these projects, many of which had little commercial potential. When money tightened in the early 1990s, this resulted in a sweeping round of empire building, in which mid-level managers attempted to take over as many projects as possible in order to make their projects more difficult to discontinue. Between 1990 and 1995, very few products were successful, with the exception of Mac OS updates, while massive projects such as QuickDraw GX and PowerTalk were released in essentially unusable forms.^{[citation needed]}

In the early 1990s, at enormous expense, Sculley led Apple to port its operating system to run on a new microprocessor, the PowerPC. Sculley later acknowledged this was his greatest mistake, indicating that he should instead have targeted the dominant Intel architecture.^[14]

Although Sculley asserted Apple's most important goal was to crack the business PC market, during his ten years at the helm, Apple failed to address the key complaint of business buyers about the Macintosh operating system: poor system stability caused by a lack of memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking.^{[citation needed]}

In 1987, Sculley made several famous predictions in a Playboy interview. ^[15] He predicted that the Soviet Union would land a man on Mars within the next 20 years and claimed that optical storage media such as the CD-ROM would revolutionize the use of personal computers. Some of his ideas for the Knowledge Navigator would eventually be fulfilled, not by Apple itself, but by the Internet and the World Wide Web during the 1990s.

[edit] 1994–present: after Apple

Sculley turned his attention to politics in the early 1990s on behalf of Republican Tom Campbell, who in 1992 was running in California for a United States Senate seat. Sculley hosted a fund-raiser for Campbell at his ranch in Woodside. Sculley had become acquainted with Hillary Clinton, serving with her on a national education council. When Bill Clinton ran for president, Sculley supported him. Sculley sat next to Hillary Clinton during the President's first State of the Union address in January 1993. ^[16]

Only one business day after leaving Apple in 1994, Sculley signed on with Spectrum Information Technologies, a US$100 million wireless communications company. At the time Sculley joined the company, it was under investigation for fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Four months later, Sculley learned of the fraud investigation and resigned, filing a lawsuit against Spectrum president Peter Caserta for damaging his reputation. ^[17]

In 1995, Sculley became an investment partner of Sculley Brothers LLC, a private investment firm in New York City.^{[citation needed]} Sculley became the chairman of Live Picture, a California-based company, in 1997, to oversee its push into high-quality, low-bandwidth imaging over the Internet. Live Picture was best known for its work in network imaging and as the inventor of zoomable images for the Internet. US$22M in venture capital was provided for the company. Sculley later left the company, but remained an investor. In 1999, Live Picture filed for federal bankruptcy protection as part of a plan to be acquired by MGI Software. ^{[18] [19]}

On July 15, 1998, Sculley joined the board of directors of BuyComp LLC (now Buy.com), an Internet-only computer store. As of 2006, Sculley is not listed as an executive at the company. ^[20]

In 2000, Sculley partnered with Dennis M. Lynch to launch Signature21. In its first year, the two-man firm provided marketing services to an array of small to medium sized businesses. In 2001, Sculley and Lynch transitioned the company into a learning program for rising entrepreneurs. Months later, Lynch left the company, while Sculley continued to consult and work with small businesses, including InPhonic.

In 2000, Sculley joined the board of directors at InPhonic, an online retailer of cell phones and wireless plans. His early leadership and enthusiasm^[21] helped steer InPhonic towards its successful IPO in 2004. Sculley currently serves as the vice chairman of the InPhonic board of directors. In 2002, Sculley endorsed and invested in the Wine Clip ^[22], a wine accessory product, which claims to accelerate the aeration of wine by exposure to magnets.

In 2003, Sculley helped found Verified Person Inc., an online pre-employment screening company. He currently serves on the board of directors.^{[citation needed]} In 2004, Sculley joined the board of directors at OpenPeak, a maker of software for wireless consumer electronics, digital media, computers, and home systems. ^[23] In March 2006, Sculley was named Chairman of IdenTrust (formerly Digital Signature Trust Company) a San Francisco based firm focusing on verifying identity and boosting financial security. ^[24] In the same year, John Sculley became a Venture Partner at Rho Ventures.

Before speaking at the Silicon Valley 4.0 conference, Sculley was interviewed by CNet in October 2003, where he explained the mistakes he made at Apple concerning the Apple Newton and HyperCard. ^[25] Also in 2003, Sculley was interviewed by the BBC for the television documentary The World's Most Powerful episode Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates, discussing his time at Apple during the 1980s as CEO. ^[26]

Sculley has spoken at Pop!Tech since its opening in 1997 every year except for 2005. ^[27]

Despite his high profile role at Apple and his political connections, Sculley's rise to greater heights was permanently damaged by his perceived lack of good judgement over the Spectrum Technology episode.

[edit] Footnotes

[edit] References

• John Sculley and John A. Byrne, Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple, ISBN 0-06-015780-1 (October 1, 1987)
• Owen W. Linzmayer, Apple Confidential 2.0, pages 153–68, ISBN 1-59327-010-0 (January 1, 2004)
• Michael S. Malone, Infinite Loop, ISBN 0-385-48684-7 (February 16, 1999)

[edit] External links

• PBS.org - John Sculley Biography
• Harry Walker Agency - John Sculley Biography
• Rho Ventures - John Sculley Venture Partner Biography
• 1987 Audio Interview with John Sculley by Don Swaim of CBS Radio - RealAudio at Wired for Books.
• 2001 Interview with InPhonic vice chairman John Sculley by Wireless Business & Technology

Preceded by Mike Markkula

Apple CEO 1983–1993

Succeeded by Michael Spindler

v • d • e CEOs of Apple Inc. Michael Scott (1977–1981) · Mike Markkula (1981–1983) · John Sculley (1983–1993) · Michael Spindler (1993–1996) · Gil Amelio (1996–1997) · Steve Jobs (1997-present)

v • d • e Key figures in the history of Apple Inc. Steve Jobs · Steve Wozniak · Michael Scott · Mike Markkula · Jef Raskin · Andy Hertzfeld · Bill Atkinson · Susan Kare · Guy Kawasaki · Jean-Louis Gassée · Del Yocam · John Sculley · Michael Spindler · Jonathan Ive · David Nagel · Gil Amelio · Philip W. Schiller · Avie Tevanian · Chris Espinosa

v • d • e InPhonic Corporate Directors: David A. Steinberg · John Sculley · Jack Kemp · Ira Brind · Lawrence E. Harris · Blake Bath Annual Revenue: $320.5 million USD (▲ 3Q 2006) · Employees: > 1,000 · Website: www.inphonic.com