sculley

It's the first interview Sculley has given on the subject of Steve Jobs since he was forced out of the company in 1993.

A year earlier Mr. Jobs had lured Mr. Sculley to Apple to be its chief executive.

I persuaded Sculley that I was a big fan of Jobs, and had no interest in digging dirt. What I wanted to know was: How does he do it?

"I don't have any contact with Steve these days, " Sculley said in one of our initial emails setting up the meeting.

And in his memoir, Sculley dismissed Jobs' vision for the company.

In the short term, appointing Sculley looked like the defining, catastrophic error of Jobs's life.

In part because Steve Jobs got pushed out by John Sculley in a way that's rare among technology companies.

Within two years, Mr. Jobs left Apple after losing a power struggle with Mr. Sculley.

Jobs was ousted from Apple in 1985 in a failed leadership battle with the CEO at the time, John Sculley.

During the resulting 90-minute conversation, Sculley divulged Jobs's first principles.

"High tech could not be designed and sold as a consumer product, " Mr. Sculley said in 1987.

In 1983, Jobs invited PepsiCo President John Sculley, center above, to join him and Wozniak at the helm of Apple, Inc.

Sculley helped force Jobs out of Apple in 1985.

"My guess, " Sculley adds, "is that Apple won't just pass Microsoft in market capitalization, but will go way beyond it. "

"My sense is that it probably would never have broken down between Steve and me if we had figured out different roles, " Sculley says.

The line he used to lure John Sculley into becoming Apple's CEO, according to Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple