John Sculley ran Apple during the 80s and early 90s. He's not on speaking terms with Steve Jobs now, but as Apple's CEO he worked as closely with Jobs as anyone has and his interview with Cult of Mac gives an amazingly detailed peak into the methodology and mind of Apple's fearless leader.
If you have any interest in Steve Jobs or Apple's origins, then you really do need to read the entire interview transcript (click the link at the bottom of the page). But if you're pressed for time, here are a few choice quotes:
On Steve Jobs' design philosophy:
"[Steve Jobs] is a minimalist and constantly reducing things to their simplest level. It’s not simplistic. It’s simplified. Steve is a systems designer. He simplifies complexity."
"He was a person of huge vision. But he was also a person that believed in the precise detail of every step. He was methodical and careful about everything â€" a perfectionist to the end."
What makes Steve’s methodology different from everyone else’s is that he always believed the most important decisions you make are not the things you do â€" but the things that you decide not to do. He’s a minimalist."
"I remember going into Steve’s house and he had almost no furniture in it. He just had a picture of Einstein, whom he admired greatly, and he had a Tiffany lamp and a chair and a bed. He just didn’t believe in having lots of things around but he was incredibly careful in what he selected. The same thing was true with Apple. Here’s someone who starts with the user experience, who believes that industrial design shouldn’t be compared to what other people were doing with technology products but it should be compared to people were doing with jewelry… "
On Apple:
"Apple is not really a technology company. Apple is really a design company. If you look at the iPod, you will see that many of the technologies that are in the iPod are ones that Apple bought from other people and put together. Even when Apple created Macintosh, all the ideas came out of Xerox and Apple recruited some of the key people out of Xerox."
"Engineers are far more important than managers at Apple â€" and designers are at the top of the hierarchy. Even when you look at software, the best designers like Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Capps, were called software designers, not software engineers because they were designing in software. It wasn’t just that their code worked. It had to be beautiful code. People would go in and admire it. It’s like a writer. People would look at someone’s style. They would look at their code writing style and they were considered just beautiful geniuses at the way they wrote code or the way they designed hardware."
