John Sculley, Apple’s CEO in the 1980s, has continued to pay close attention to Apple, despite having had no relationship with the company in years. “Everything at Apple can be best understood through the lens of designing,” he told Leander Kahney, editor of the Apple-focused blog Cult of Mac, in 2010. He related a recent story about a friend who held meetings at Apple and Microsoft on the same day. “He went into the meeting at Apple [and] as soon as the designers walked in the room, everyone stopped talking because the designers are the most respected people in the organization. It is only at Apple where design reports directly to the CEO. Later in the day he was at Microsoft. When he went into the Microsoft meeting, everybody was talking and then the meeting starts and no designers ever walk into the room. All the technical people are sitting there trying to add their ideas of what ought to be in the design. That’s a recipe for disaster.”
