Steve Wozniak

I used to say that when being a CEO at Apple wasn't fun anymore, I'd quit.

But now I've changed my mind.

When it isn't fun anymore, I'll fire people until it's fun again.

Steve Jobs was furious and demanded Scott's removal.

The board agreed.

Scott was stripped of his operational duties and resigned in July.

But the damage was done.

The culture that had built Apple was shattered.

Public companies answered to shareholders and not to engineers who built the products.

For Wozniak, this was the final confirmation the company he'd co-founded had become something he no longer recognized.

In 1981, IBM entered the personal computer market.

Apple ran a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal that said, It was meant to be cocky, but it was based on a fundamental misunderstanding about what was about to happen.

The IBM PC wasn't technically revolutionary.

It used commodity parts and a processor less capable than Apple's.

But IBM brought something that Apple couldn't match, credibility in corporate America, their legendary sales force, their support network, their brand.

And IBM made a critical decision.

They designed the PC with an open architecture.

They published complete technical specifications and encouraged third-party developers to build for it.

They did exactly what Wozniak had wanted Apple to do.

The ecosystem that had made the Apple II so successful, the one that came from those eight expansion slots Wozniak fought for, IBM replicated it on purpose.