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[Dire]

No, there's plenty of details about the boardroom coup attempt, Sculley even alludes to a showdown. You can keep trying to fit it into a narrative of simply being focused on results, but there's plenty of information out there on this issue, including Jobs arranging a boardroom meeting on Sculley's planned trip to China, and how Jean-Louise told Sculley of Jobs plans so he could cancel his trip and fight off the coup attempt.

Sculley got rid of Jobs because Jobs, a 15% shareholder and chairman of the board, was trying to get rid of him.

Sculley likes to say many different things in hindsight, here's another, which indicates it was about a power struggle:


http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/06/06/why-i-fired-steve-jobs.html

A basic chronology:

1. Jobs has poor results, primarily with one product, over a relatively short period of time.
2. Jobs defends his stances in spite of short term results. Sculley disagrees and believes kneejerk reactions are necessary.
3. Sculley and Job cannot reconcile this difference so Sculley moves to have Jobs fired.
4. Instead of firing him outright. The board agrees to relegate Jobs to a token and powerless position. They literally relocate his "office" to an abandoned building nearby.
5. Jobs gets upset about this and tries to get rid of Sculley.
6. Jobs appeals to the board. They dislike his short term results and side with Sculley, allowing him to fire Jobs.
7. Several years later the board also fires Sculley after he has a bad year.

You're focused on exactly #3. It was a chain reaction started by knee jerking over short term results and ultimately concluded with a justification based on short term results. The "power struggle" was Jobs disagreeing with the obsession over short term results, and short term results winning out.

Interesting link though. Gives you some real insight into the type of people that make up these boards:

Board member Arthur Rock, a venture capitalist who helped found Intel, among other outfits, dubbed Jobs and his co-founder Steve Wozniak as “very unappealing people” in the early days. “Jobs came into the office, as he does now, dressed in Levi’s, but at that time that wasn’t quite the thing to do,” Rock told a little-noticed University of California, Berkeley venture-capital oral-history project. “And I believe he had a goatee and a mustache and long hair—and he had just come back from six months in India with a guru, learning about life. I’m not sure, but it may have been a while since he had a bath.”

 

[numble]

A basic chronology:

1. Jobs has poor results, primarily with one product, over a relatively short period of time.
2. Jobs defends his stances in spite of short term results. Sculley disagrees and believes kneejerk reactions are necessary.
3. Sculley and Job cannot reconcile this difference so Sculley moves to have Jobs fired.
4. Instead of firing him outright. The board agrees to relegate Jobs to a token and powerless position. They literally relocate his "office" to an abandoned building nearby.
5. Jobs gets upset about this and tries to get rid of Sculley.
6. Jobs appeals to the board. They dislike his short term results and side with Sculley, allowing him to fire Jobs.
7. Several years later the board also fires Sculley after he has a bad year.

You're focused on exactly #3. It was a chain reaction started by knee jerking over short term results and ultimately concluded with a justification based on short term results. The "power struggle" was Jobs disagreeing with the obsession over short term results, and short term results winning out.

Interesting link though. Gives you some real insight into the type of people that make up these boards:

You don't even have your chronology correct, his role wasn't relegated until after Jobs tried to go to the board behind Sculley's back, and Sculley cancelled a trip to China to turn the tables and get rid of Jobs instead. Jobs wouldn't have been relieved and relegated if he didn't try to get rid of Sculley. Jobs called the board meeting on May 24, 1985. He was formally relieved of all duties on May 31. This is why Sculley alludes to a showdown and regrets not being able to achieve a coexistence. Prior to the coup attempt, the board and Sculley wanted to move Jobs to a product visionary role. The coup attempt forced the issue into a showdown of picking between the two with no coexistence.

If you look at Walter Isaacson's Jobs biography, which comes from accounts from Jobs and Apple employees it was clearly the result of a power struggle, and came to a head because of Jobs' attempts to replace Sculley:
http://books.google.com/books?id=8U...rt&dq="may+24"+apple+sculley&output=html_text

 

[Dire]

Christ man. Read your own sources. Or for that matter read any one source in its entirety. Go back a few pages in the book you referenced. Page 197. End of March 1985. Sulley informs Jobs he's going to try to remove him by force from the Macintosh division as a consequence of Job's recent results. This isn't controversial nor open to "interpretation." It's well accepted and you're wrong.

The only reason I keep correcting you is that I think this was an incredibly important and precedent setting event, and I worry you might mislead others.

 

[Garrus Vakarian]

I love irrational games. I am based out of Boston and 14 years ago my second interview out of college was with irrational to be their IT person. I even interviewed with Ken at the time. Unfortunately I did not get the job.

Flash forward to a year ago and I get a call from the current IT manager at Irrational wanting to interview me for his position since he was leaving. I have been a gamer my entire life and I follow the industry closely. Working for a game company has always been a dream of mine.

However I am also older now with a family, mortgage and other responsibilities. I know from following the industry how often developer go out of business and I even asked how financially viable the company is should Bioshock Infinite fail to hit it's marks. Long story short I declined to pursue the position.

After hearing the news yesterday of the studio's closing it shows i made the correct decision.

At least some good news came out of all of this, hopefully those who are now out in the wild because of this have the same fortunes.

 

[numble]

Christ man. Read your own sources. Or for that matter read any one source in its entirety. Go back a few pages in the book you referenced. Page 197. End of March 1985. Sulley informs Jobs he's going to try to remove him by force from the Macintosh division as a consequence of Job's recent results. This isn't controversial nor open to "interpretation." It's well accepted and you're wrong.

The only reason I keep correcting you is that I think this was an incredibly important and precedent setting event, and I worry you might mislead others.

Your chronology says he was already removed and placed in Siberia before Jobs attempted to remove Sculley. That is objectively wrong nor open to "interpretation."

Read the pages again, both before and after the showdown, the board was trying to work out a situation where they would both coexist within Apple. It was not a situation where they simply fired Jobs because of results. Not when board member Bill Campbell is saying we can't let Jobs leave Apple at the same meeting. It does not fit your simplistic narrative of firing somebody because of their results, when all the details involved trying to work out a coexistence, Sculley regretting he couldn't get a coexistence together, and the pivotal part where Jobs failed in his coup attempt and letting Sculley catch wind of it to cancel a trip to China and scuppering his attempt.

 

[Dire]

Now I'm convinced you're trolling me. What exactly do you think this "co-existence" issue was about?

The "co-existence" issue (#3) was caused because Sculley was trying to fire jobs over his poor short term performance (#2)! You may be correct, for once, on needing to swap 5/6.

 

[numble]

Now I'm convinced you're trolling me. What exactly do you think this "co-existence" issue was about?

The "co-existence" issue (#3) was caused because Sculley was trying to fire jobs over his poor short term performance (#2)! You may be correct, for once, on needing to swap 5/6.

The co-existence issue was because Jobs always wanted to be CEO, and thus clashed with Sculley. The board and Sculley wanted him to stay at Apple in an operational but not in a managerial role. Read Isaacson's description of the post-showdown discussions between Sculley and Jobs. Read about how Sculley talked about wishing they could've delineate roles where they wouldn't clash. Or how Sculley said he couldn't trust or tolerate Jobs for trying to remove him behind his back.

 

[Dire]

I don't even know what to say. Your entire suggestion is based on.... mindreading... while ignoring all evidence to the contrary?

These quotes are from Sculley himself:

“Apple had failed with Lisa, had failed with the Apple III. The Apple II was near end of life. The company needed cash flow in order to finance the development of the Macintosh, which wasn’t expected to be profitable for several years, even after launch.”
“When the Macintosh Office, which was the next version of the Mac that was introduced in 1985, it failed. Steve went into a deep depression over it.”
“The reality was that the Macintosh Office was not powerful enough. ... It had nothing to do with Apple, it had to do with the stage of where microprocessing was. It just couldn’t do very much. It was being called a toy, it was being ridiculed in the market. Steve was discouraged.”
"And so Steve came to me and he said, 'I want to drop the price of the Macintosh and I want to move the advertising, shift a large portion of it away from the Apple 2 over to the Mac."
"And I said, 'Steve, it's not going to make any difference. The reason the Mac is not selling has nothing to do with the price or with the advertising. If you do that, we risk throwing the company into a loss.' And he just totally disagreed with me."
"And so I said, 'Well, I'm gonna go to the board.' And he said,'I don't believe you'll do it.' And I said, ‘Watch me.'"

In fact I'll do one better. Here is the video (source of said quotes) with Sculley discussing, at length, exactly what happened: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8V4XhtQ4H8

 

[pa22word]

How we suddenly got on the topic of secret apple board meetings on a thread about a games studio closing, I'll never know ?_?

 

[Andrew Korenchkin]

I'm still mourning the death of Irrational.

 

[numble]

I don't even know what to say. Your entire suggestion is based on.... mindreading... while ignoring all evidence to the contrary?

These quotes are from Sculley himself:



In fact I'll do one better. Here is the video (source of said quotes) with Sculley discussing, at length, exactly what happened: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8V4XhtQ4H8

And Sculley has also talked about a showdown, and all accounts talk about the May 24 confrontation. He talks about failures with Lisa and the Apple III, but those were not Jobs projects.

The part you bolded was about a disagreement about strategies for the future, which is emblematic of a clash over prospective strategy, not past action.

If both Jobs and Sculley didn't force the issue into a binary decision of choosing either one or the other, and Jobs was ok with a product role instead of a strategy/managerial role, Jobs wouldn't have left Apple to start NeXT, which is what he did instead of actually being removed.

 

[MoGamesXNA]

.

 

[pa22word]

It's time to get drunk GAF.

...

 

[paile]

He better write another Bioshock, don't give a fuck what company he's with.

 

[Dire]

And Sculley has also talked about a showdown, and all accounts talk about the May 24 confrontation. He talks about failures with Lisa and the Apple III, but those were not Jobs projects.

The part you bolded was about a disagreement about strategies for the future, which is emblematic of a clash over prospective strategy, not past action.

If both Jobs and Sculley didn't force the issue into a binary decision of choosing either one or the other, and Jobs was ok with a product role instead of a strategy/managerial role, Jobs wouldn't have left Apple to start NeXT, which is what he did instead of actually being removed.

And once again the "strategy for the future" was how to deal with the recent results of Jobs.

A concise and accurate way to view this is would this have occurred if Jobs' results were as high as expected? No obviously not, the poor short term results -in particular of the Mac division- were what caused all of this to happen.

 

[numble]

And once again the "strategy for the future" was how to deal with the recent results of Jobs.

A concise and accurate way to view this is would this have occurred if Jobs' results were as high as expected? No obviously not, the poor short term results -in particular of the Mac division- were what caused all of this to happen.

I think Sculley would have removed Jobs if Jobs tried to remove him from the CEO position, and I think Jobs would still have clashed with Sculley because he wanted to lead his company the whole time--even Sculley acknowledged that he was there in a "partner" role to mentor Steve. The Mac line was already what they were throwing their hat behind after the failure of the Apple 3 and Lisa. Sculley wanted to just push declining Apple 2 sales until they could push out the next generation Macintosh, as he said--the line wasn't expected to be profitable for several years, so he didn't want to push sales early on. Finally, even insiders like Andy Hertzfeld blamed Sculley for the poor sales based on the price set by Sculley:
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Price_Fight.txt

"You're not going to like this," he told us, "but Sculley is insisting that we charge $2495 for the Mac instead of $1995, and use the extra money for a bigger marketing budget. He figures that the early adopters will buy it no matter what the price. He also wants more of a cushion to protect Apple II sales. But don't worry, I'm not going to let him get away with it!"

The design team was horrified. One of the main reasons that we were so passionate about the Macintosh was that we thought we were working on something that we would use ourselves, along with our friends and relatives. It was crucial that it be affordable to ordinary people. $2500 felt like a betrayal of everything that we were trying to accomplish. We worked very hard to keep the price down in every aspect of the design, and now it was being artificially inflated for reasons that didn't make sense to us. But we thought that Steve would prevail, and be able to convince John that we'd do better at the lower price.

But finally, much to our surprise and dismay, after a week or so of wrangling, Steve was the one who gave in, and the Mac was priced at $2495 at launch. Even though it sold quickly at first, soon sales bogged down, partially due to the lack of available software, but also because of the price.

 

[Kade]

I wasn't sure what was going to happen to the Irrational Games official website and its contents, particularly the excellent podcasts (Irrational Behavior and Irrational Interviews) so I've downloaded them all and compiled them into one package; all episodes, all show notes. If the site goes down, this great content can live on to show how awesome the people at Irrational were.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1277278/IrrationalPodcasts.rar

 

[lucius]

Bioshock maybe the best overall trilogy released the past generation. Love to see what new games a brilliant guy like Ken Levine comes up with, but at same time a little sad, maybe he will revisit the series at some point much later but doesn't sound like it.

 

[Andrew Korenchkin]

http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/6/5474722/why-did-irrational-close-bioshock-infinite

I'm not sure if this is worth a new thread, so I posted it here.

 

[ZQQLANDER]

http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/6/5474722/why-did-irrational-close-bioshock-infinite

I'm not sure if this is worth a new thread, so I posted it here.

"Other former employees had a more extreme reaction to their boss's creative process. At least one department had instituted a policy of "essentially having the lead observe a 'dress rehearsal' of any meeting that was planned to present content to Ken." In interviews from 2012, former employees of Irrational called this practice "Ken Whispering."

This sounds pretty intense ^. Great article. Definitely a lot going on behind the scenes with people coming and going. It seems they didn't even have a good grasp on what they were doing til 2012 which is astonishing.

Edit: This article also gave me a lot more respect for 2k Marin. Seems like they had a solid hand in making this game better/getting it off the ground. No surprise really considering B2 was such a good game mechanically

 

[Dragon1893]

http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/6/5474722/why-did-irrational-close-bioshock-infinite

I'm not sure if this is worth a new thread, so I posted it here.

Fascinating stuff, thanks for the link.

 

[ashecitism]

http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/6/5474722/why-did-irrational-close-bioshock-infinite

I'm not sure if this is worth a new thread, so I posted it here.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=103419962

 

[Silkworm]

http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/6/5474722/why-did-irrational-close-bioshock-infinite

I'm not sure if this is worth a new thread, so I posted it here.

Thanks for sharing that link. It's a bittersweet story. If Thomas and Fergusson had joined in on the Bioshock Infinite project earlier perhaps it would have had a happier ending. Who knows. Anyway, I hope all those affected have already or will soon find new jobs.

 

[Andrew Korenchkin]

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=103419962

Damn, my bad.