Odyssey: From Pepsi to Apple - A Journey of Adventure, Innovation and Future Vision | Business Biography & Tech History Book for Entrepreneurs

Well, I read this book after viewing Job's lecture at Stanford […] really fascinating. So I would know what was happening behind the scenes, and what went wrong on the love story of Jobs and Sculley.The book explains Sculley's East Coast (and Republican) vision of how to manage a big company, which, is, essentially, I may say a "military" way to organize a company, with clear objectives and responsabilities, vs. the West Coast (and Democrat) which is more cooperative and less organized. Of course you cannot manage a multimillion company with the manager deciding on everything, from the profile of the programmers to hire to the marketing budget.It explains also the big mistake Sculley (and others have done) when trying to emulate the Sosa wars, with IBM-PC vs. Macintosh. A consumer may just pick one Pepsi on the shelves of a supermarket, and test it, and eventually switch brands... An IT Manager simply cannot do that, and its amazing that people as smart as Apple Board of Directors didn't see this. Anyhow, since then Apple has profiled his public and they did not try to compete with PC clones anymore. They aim their sales to a prospective buyer who is not the IT Manager anymore. Probably this is not a decision done by Jobs when returning to Apple.What the book says is not as important as what the book hides, probably the fact that not all companies are created equal, and there is no such thing as "one size fits all". Probably Sculley was the right man for the job in a certain moment, but sure Apple under his management would have become a "me too" company, as Hewlett-Packard is now. Of course I prefer the panache of DEC trying to convince the world to follow their way - although they did not suceed - to the Compaq-HP deal, manufacturing dull machines with dull O.S.