us has any idea how long we’re going to be here, nor do I, but my feeling is I’ve got to accomplish
a lot of these things while I’m young.”
Jobs and Sculley would talk dozens of times a day in the early
months of their relationship. “Steve and I became soul mates, near constant companions,”
Sculley said. “We tended to speak in half sentences and phrases.” Jobs flattered Sculley. When he
dropped by to hash something out, he would say something like “You’re the only one who will
understand.” They would tell each other repeatedly, indeed so often that it should have been
worrying, how happy they were to be with each other and working in tandem. And at every
opportunity Sculley would find similarities with Jobs and point them out:
We could complete each other’s sentences because we were on the same wavelength. Steve
would rouse
me from sleep at 2 a.m. with a phone call to chat about an idea that suddenly crossed his mind. “Hi! It’s
me,” he’d harmlessly say to the dazed listener, totally unaware of the time. I curiously had done the
same in my Pepsi days. Steve would rip apart a presentation he had to give the next morning, throwing
out slides and text. So had I as I struggled to turn public speaking into an important management tool
during my early days at Pepsi. As a young executive, I was always impatient to get things done and
often felt I could do them better myself. So did Steve. Sometimes I felt as if I was watching Steve
playing me in a movie. The similarities were uncanny, and they were behind the amazing symbiosis we
developed.
This was self-delusion, and it was a recipe for disaster. Jobs began to sense it early on. “We had
different ways of looking at the world,
different views on people, different values,” Jobs recalled.
“I began to realize this a few months after he arrived. He didn’t learn things very quickly, and the
people he wanted to promote were usually bozos.”
Yet Jobs knew that he could manipulate Sculley by encouraging his belief that they were so
alike. And the more he manipulated Sculley, the more contemptuous of him he became. Canny
observers in the Mac group, such as Joanna Hoffman, soon realized what was happening and
knew that it would make the inevitable breakup more explosive. “Steve made Sculley feel like he
was exceptional,” she said. “Sculley had never felt that. Sculley became infatuated,
because Steve
projected on him a whole bunch of attributes that he didn’t really have. When it became clear that
Sculley didn’t match all of these projections, Steve’s distortion of reality had created an explosive
situation.”
The ardor eventually began to cool on Sculley’s side as well. Part of his weakness in trying to
manage a dysfunctional company was his desire to please other people, one of many traits that he
did not share with Jobs. He was a polite person; this caused him to recoil at Jobs’s rudeness to
their fellow workers. “We would go to the Mac building at eleven at night,” he recalled, “and they
would bring him code to show. In some cases he wouldn’t even look at it. He would just take it
and throw it back at them. I’d say, ‘How can you turn it down?’ And he would say, ‘I know they
can do better.’” Sculley tried to coach him. “You’ve got
to learn to hold things back,” he told him
at one point. Jobs would agree, but it was not in his nature to filter his feelings through a gauze.
Sculley began to believe that Jobs’s mercurial personality and erratic treatment of people were
rooted deep in his psychological makeup, perhaps the reflection of a mild bipolarity. There were
big mood swings; sometimes he would be ecstatic, at other times he was depressed. At times he
would launch into brutal tirades without warning, and Sculley would have to calm him down.
“Twenty minutes later, I would get another call and be told to come over because Steve is losing it
again,” he said.
Their first substantive disagreement was over how to price the Macintosh. It had been
conceived as a $1,000 machine, but Jobs’s design changes had pushed up
the cost so that the plan
was to sell it at $1,995. However, when Jobs and Sculley began making plans for a huge launch
and marketing push, Sculley decided that they needed to charge $500 more. To him, the marketing
costs were like any other production cost and needed to be factored into the price. Jobs resisted,
furiously. “It will destroy everything we stand for,” he said. “I want to make this a revolution, not
an effort to squeeze out profits.” Sculley said it was a simple choice: He could have the $1,995
price or he could have the marketing budget for a big launch, but not both.
“You’re not going to like this,” Jobs told Hertzfeld and the other engineers, “but Sculley is
insisting that we charge $2,495 for the Mac instead of $1,995.” Indeed the engineers were
horrified. Hertzfeld pointed out that they were designing the Mac for people like themselves, and
overpricing it would be a “betrayal” of what they stood for.
So
Jobs promised them, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to let him get away with it!” But in the
end, Sculley prevailed. Even twenty-five years later Jobs seethed when recalling the decision: “It’s
the main reason the Macintosh sales slowed and Microsoft got to dominate the market.” The
decision made him feel that he was losing control of his product and company, and this was as
dangerous as making a tiger feel cornered.