It's Sculley and the techs files

By PETER GRIFFIN IT writer

Despite 20 years rubbing shoulders with scruffy computer geeks, John Sculley is still the dark suit and tie-wearing type.

The former head of Pepsi-Cola and Apple Computer, in Auckland for the two-day "investment regatta" conference put on by Investment New Zealand, started out selling not innovative technology, but soda pop.

He has a glowing record for turning around shaky businesses - whether it was Pepsi's shambolic snack-food ventures in Mexico or Brazil in the seventies, or Apple's disorganised personal computer business in the eighties.

If there's a man to ask advice about how to commercialise a product, it's Sculley.

Since parting ways with Apple in 1993, he's flitted around the IT industry, putting money and time into a handful of ventures.

"I get involved in very few things, but very deeply," he says.

"And I'm careful who I open doors for."

His post-Apple investments have been varied, but all come from the same mould - they are disruptive technologies.

There's US wireless phone company MetroPCS, which is offering "all you can eat" phone-calling for US$35 ($NZ64) a month. An as-yet unnamed IT outsourcing company he claims has 4000 clients and will turn over US$200 million ($NZ365 million) this year. There's also his Aussie investment - a company working on delivering DVD-quality video over low-speed internet connections.

He hasn't opened his wallet in New Zealand, but he likes the talent down here.

Used to working on "small islands" - Ireland, Singapore and Bermuda among them, Sculley doesn't see New Zealand's size as a disadvantage.

In fact, he believes the country is well-suited to ride on the tidal wave created when new technologies emerge out of the laboratory and change the way we do things.

"You couldn't have eBay until you had Netscape. New Zealand is an ideal place for those second-order derivatives." And you don't have to have piles of money to get started.

"Arthur Rock's typical investment was US$50,000," says Sculley of the famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist who took punts on the likes of Intel and Apple when they were just start-ups.

More important are visionary people and the networks they create, argues Sculley, who will fly to Wellington for a visit with Peter Jackson and Weta Studios. And a Government willing to get its hands dirty.

"I'd rather have Kevin Roberts' enthusiasm than $100 million of venture capital to spend."

He believes The Lord of the Rings films have done more to boost the perception of New Zealand in the US than anything else.

A marketing man from way back, having led the "Pepsi Challenge", a marketing campaign credited with lifting Pepsi above Coke in the "cola wars", Sculley got out of Pepsi when tech visionary Steve Jobs asked him whether he wanted to sell sugared water for the rest of his life, or change the world.

He told the story in a soul-baring autobiography in the late eighties.

More than anything in that book, Sculley focused on the torment he went through in making the decision to sack his best friend and Apple founder Steve Jobs.

He says he ejected an out-of-control Jobs to save the company. After Sculley departed, he says Apple well and truly dropped the ball.

"They went in an entirely different direction. They stopped making hit products, they went through two chief executives and almost went bankrupt."

After the management tug-of-wars that have peppered Apple's history, has he buried the hatchet with Jobs?

"I don't discuss that," Sculley answers curtly. End of story.

Old scars run deep, it seems, but Sculley's respect for Jobs remains undiminished.

He credits Jobs, who migrated back to Apple as chief executive in the late nineties, for turning around the troubled computer maker - going back to the core values of 20 years ago and pushing sexy products like the iMac and the iPod music player.

"We never thought of Apple as a consumer product back then," Sculley says.

"Product styling and fashion were just as important as the technology."

Despite arriving in Silicon Valley as a stiff suit from east-coast corporate America without a clue about computers, Sculley is nostalgic for the early days of the tech hot-spot, before "smartly dressed investment bankers" filled the valley with venture capital in the nineties.

"Bill Gates used to drive his own car and ride in the back of the plane. These people never talked about money, they talked about changing the world."

Driven and intensely passionate, Sculley really did want to change the world, but he will always be seen as an operations and marketing guy, not an ideas guy.

He ends this interview mid-sentence. With a brief handshake, the suit is gone. Sculley smiled only once.