Steve Jobs

have Sculley ousted. He would reach out to Sculley, then lash out at him behind his back, sometimes on the same night. One night at 9 he called Apple’s general counsel Al Eisenstat to say he was losing confidence in Sculley and needed his help convincing the board to fire him; at 11 the same night, he phoned Sculley to say, “You’re terrific, and I just want you to know I love working with you.”
    At the board meeting on April 11, Sculley officially reported that he wanted to ask Jobs to step down as the head of the Macintosh division and focus instead on new product development. Arthur Rock, the most crusty and independent of the board members, then spoke. He was fed up with both of them: with Sculley for not having the guts to take command over the past year, and with Jobs for “acting like a petulant brat.” The board needed to get this dispute behind them, and to do so it should meet privately with each of them.
    Sculley left the room so that Jobs could present first. Jobs insisted that Sculley was the problem because he had no understanding of computers. Rock responded by berating Jobs. In his growling voice, he said that Jobs had been behaving foolishly for a year and had no right to be managing a division. Even Jobs’s strongest supporter, Phil Schlein, tried to talk him into stepping aside gracefully to run a research lab for the company.
    When it was Sculley’s turn to meet privately with the board, he gave an ultimatum: “You can back me, and then I take responsibility for running the company, or we can do nothing, and you’re going to have to find yourselves a new CEO.” If given the authority, he said, he would not move abruptly, but would ease Jobs into the new role over the next few months. The board unanimously sided with Sculley. He was given the authority to remove Jobs whenever he felt the timing was right. As Jobs waited outside the boardroom, knowing full well that he was losing, he saw Del Yocam, a longtime colleague, and hugged him.
    After the board made its decision, Sculley tried to be conciliatory. Jobs asked that the transition occur slowly, over the next few months, and Sculley agreed. Later that evening Sculley’s executive assistant, Nanette Buckhout, called Jobs to see how he was doing. He was still in his office, shell-shocked. Sculley had already left, and Jobs came over to talk to her. Once again he began oscillating wildly in his attitude toward Sculley. “Why did John do this to me?” he said. “He betrayed me.” Then he swung the other way. Perhaps he should take some time away to work on restoring his relationship with Sculley, he said. “John’s friendship is more important than anything else, and I think maybe that’s what I should do, concentrate on our friendship.”
    Plotting a Coup
    Jobs was not good at taking no for an answer. He went to Sculley’s office in early May 1985 and asked for more time to show that he could manage the Macintosh division. He would prove himself as an operations guy, he promised. Sculley didn’t back down. Jobs next tried a direct challenge: He asked Sculley to resign. “I think you really lost your stride,” Jobs told him. “You were really great the first year, and everything went wonderful. But something happened.” Sculley, who generally was even-tempered, lashed back, pointing out that Jobs had been unable to get Macintosh software developed, come up with new models, or win customers. The meeting degenerated into a shouting match about who was the worse manager. After Jobs stalked out, Sculley turned away from the glass wall of his office, where others had been looking in on the meeting, and wept.
    Matters began to come to a head on Tuesday, May 14, when the Macintosh team made its quarterly review presentation to Sculley and other Apple corporate leaders. Jobs still had not relinquished control of the division, and he was defiant when he arrived in the corporate boardroom with his team. He and Sculley began by clashing over what the division’s mission was. Jobs said it was to sell more Macintosh machines. Sculley said it was to serve the interests of the Apple company as a whole. As usual there was little cooperation among the divisions;for one thing, the Macintosh team was planning new disk drives that were different from those being developed by the Apple II division. The debate, according to the minutes, took a full hour.
    Jobs then described the projects under way: a more powerful Mac, which would take the