arotau

There’s a fantastic interview with John Sculley (former Apple CEO) about Steve Jobs. It’s very interesting if you are interested in Steve Jobs, but there are some other great bits in it too – e.g.

I remember going to CES when Microsoft launched Zune and it was literally so boring that people didn’t even go over to look at it… The Zunes were just dead. It was like someone had just put aging vegetables into a supermarket. Nobody wanted to go near it.

But I thought the most striking thing in the interview was how openly he describes his own failure to lead Apple successfully. How often do you see business leaders describe themselves with humility like this:

Looking back, it was a big mistake that I was ever hired as CEO. I was not the first choice that Steve wanted to be the CEO. He was the first choice, but the board wasn’t prepared to make him CEO when he was 25, 26 years old.

All the design ideas were clearly Steve’s. The one who should really be given credit for all that stuff while I was there is really Steve.

I made two really dumb mistakes that I really regret because I think they would have made a difference to Apple.

So we totally missed the boat. Intel would spend 11 billion dollars and evolve the Intel processor to do graphics… and it was a terrible technical decision. I wasn’t technically qualified, unfortunately, so I went along with the recommendation.

The other even bigger failure on my part was if I had thought about it better I should have gone back to Steve.

Years ago I worked for Ross Ihaka at on the R project, a free software statistics environment that has become pretty popular (if you visit the website you can see my name in the contributors list – though my contributions were not exactly central to the project!). R has now featured in a New York Times article entitled R, the Software, Finds Fans in Data Analysts. There are some great quotes:

“R is really important to the point that it’s hard to overvalue it,” said Daryl Pregibon, a research scientist at Google, which uses the software widely. “It allows statisticians to do very intricate and complicated analyses without knowing the blood and guts of computing systems.”

It’s nice to see a great piece of free software recognised like this, and kind of cool for me to have something I worked on getting that kind of publicity. I’ve asked someone in NY to send me a copy of the print edition from that day, so hopefully I’ll have a memento to keep.