Pursuits
John Sculley Made Apple's '1984' Ad, and He Still Thinks It Rules
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John Sculley blames Businessweek, in part, for prompting Apple to run its now infamous “1984″ Super Bowl ad. The magazine’s October 1983 cover, which declared IBM the winner of the personal-computer revolution, sparked a reaction at the struggling startup that co-founder Steve Jobs and his board had asked Sculley to lead.
“We were pretty bummed by that,” Sculley told an audience yesterday during a panel discussion in New York to mark the ad’s 30th anniversary. So when Apple was ready to launch its user-friendly Macintosh computer, the primary villain took the form of Big Blue. “We just wanted to get out to the biggest audience,” he recalled. “Steve loved it being about emotion and experience—that the Mac would change the world.”