"Do you want
to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me
and change the world?"
"Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do
you want to come with me and change the world?" was Steve Jobs' legendary
pitch some 30 years enticing John Sculley , then PepsiCo's president, to join a
fledgling Apple Computers.
They both fell out subsequently. Sculley, 72, believes "the best
part of my journey is happening now", being a "mentor, investor (he
has a family office) and rainmaker working with talented entrepreneurs".
Apple is still a part of his life - he uses the iPad, Macbook Air and an
iPhone! In an email interview with ET , Sculley looks back at his career and
also looks ahead at the tech world. Excerpts:
Do you think you
could have answered that famous pitch by Steve Jobs differently?
No. I always would have wondered what I had missed if I hadn't accepted
Steve Jobs' challenge to come and help him change the world.
What lessons can
you offer India's IT companies on marketing in the US, competing better with
IBM, Accenture?
The old BPO model is pretty mature. It was created before BYOD (Bring
Your Own Device) mobility, virtualisation, cloud computing, cloud storage and
cloud networks. Today, the shift is towards platforms-as-a-service which is
quite different from traditional BPO transaction processing services.
Last year when I spoke at Nasscom, I talked about
'Expertise-as-a-Service'. I'm even more convinced this year that domain
expertise and near-sourcing services will be drivers that will shape the next
era of BPO. As successful as firms like Accenture have been, they carry a lot
of legacy overhead making it challenging to adapt to the new ways to reinvent
work.
Indra Nooyi is
trying to take a health food approach, which is good in the long run but no one
seems to be liking it. What advice would you give Nooyi?
I have been gone from PepsiCo 29 years so I'm in no position to offer
insightful advice to Indra Nooyi. In the 1970s PepsiCo was a much smaller and
less complex company. I was the first CEO of Frito-Lay International (the snack
foods business outside USA).
I enjoyed this job even more than my 10 years as Apple CEO in the
1980s. Everything in those days was focused around the concept of what we
called "experience marketing" (Pepsi Generation & Pepsi
Challenge). When Jobs asked me how Pepsi did so well in the Cola Wars I said,
"Because we market the experience, not the product." Jobs and I took
"experience marketing" to Apple when we introduced Macintosh in 1984
at the Super Bowl.
What are the
learnings from the cola wars that can be applied in the increasingly
commoditised tech industry?
Technology is commoditising so quickly and the investments in R&D
are so large that it's impossible for most consumer electronics companies to
compete with Apple's iPad. Apple sells a complete end-to-end system; its technology
is mostly proprietary; it's as superb at supply chain management as it is at a
no-compromise product design; App Store and the Apple Store are as much a part
of the "experience marketing" as the products themselves.
Where do you see
Apple going?
I predict many good years ahead for Apple. The only serious tablet
competitor in sight to the iPad at this time is Samsung's Galaxy. We know the
landscape can change quickly but Apple has an extraordinary executive team. Companies
like Sony are trying to deal with the challenges of the legacy businesses (like
the money losing television unit) while Apple is riding a wave and can focus
all its talent on the future.
Today the market
is flooded with gadgets. Is there an end to this?
There is still an opportunity, especially in India, China and Africa
for a very inexpensive smartphone. Many tech watchers in the US have pretty
much written off Nokia and Microsoft as serious competitors in the smartphone
market. I think Nokia and Microsoft may surprise the industry with a successful
low-end smartphone.
I also think it is too early to count Windows 8 out as a mobile
platform. The developer versions of both Windows 8 and Windows Mobile are
impressive. That said, my focus is on BYOD and the enterprise cloud computing
opportunity.
SANGEETHA KANDAVEL,ET BUREAU
economictimes.indiatimes.com
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