Edible Apple

Below is a never before seen video of Steve Jobs taken in 1995. At the time, Jobs was the CEO of NeXT and the prospect of Jobs returning to the Apple wasn’t on anyone’s radar. The interview below was conducted as part of an oral history program tracking the evolution of important figures, events, and companies in Silicon Valley.

The video is over 75 minutes long but provides an always interesting glimpse into the mind of Jobs and how he felt about issues as varied as school vouchers and why Apple failed in the early 90’s.

If you don’t have time to sit down and watch the entire video, you can read a transcript of the interview over here courtesy of Computerworld.

Below is an excerpt of Jobs blaming John Sculley for the downfall of Apple.

“I think what’s happened since I left in terms of growth rate has been trivial compared with what it was like when I was there. What ruined Apple wasn’t growth. What ruined Apple was values. John Sculley ruined Apple and he ruined it by bringing a set of values to the top of Apple which were corrupt and corrupted some of the top people who were there, drove out some of the ones who were not corruptible, and brought in more corrupt ones and paid themselves collectively tens of millions of dollars and cared more about their own glory and wealth than they did about what built Apple in the first place — which was making great computers for people to use.

They didn’t care about that anymore. They didn’t have a clue about how to do it and they didn’t take any time to find out because that’s not what they cared about. They cared about making a lot of money. So they had this wonderful thing that a lot of brilliant people made called the Macintosh and they got very greedy. And instead of following the original trajectory of the original vision — which was to make this thing an appliance, to get this out there to as many people as possible — they went for profits and they made outlandish profits for about four years. Apple was one of the most profitable companies in America for about four years.”