John Sculley: Steve Jobs 'was never fired' from Apple

Steve Jobs openly talked about getting fired from Apple, calling it "devastating" and blaming John Sculley for it.

In his famous 2005 commencement speech at Standford University, he said:

We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. And so, at 30, I was out... and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

Later in that speech he famously described the event as a blessing in disguise:

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

But former Apple CEO John Sculley just told a different version of events.

He says that Jobs was never technically fired.

During an onstage interview at the Engage 2015 Conference in Prague, conducted by BI UK editor Jim Edwards, Sculley said:

Steve was never fired. He took a sabbatical and was still chairman of the board. He was down, no one pushed him, but he was off the Mac, which was his deal - he never forgave me for that.

"He started NeXt and was sued by the board for hiring Apple engineers, but he was never fired by Apple."

Its hard to imagine that Apple sued its own co-founder and still-sitting chairman for hiring Apple engineers for a new venture. But that's the way Sculley remembers it.

In 20/20 hindsight, Sculley also admitted on stage (as he has done repeatedly) that the episode was a mistake.

I look back and think what a mistake on my part. Corporate America was secular and there just wasn't the passion you see today where there is such respect for founders. To remove a founder, even if he was never fired, was a mistake.

Ironically, during the interview Sculley also talked about how he's hired former Apple folks for his latest venture, Obi Mobiles, reports Silicon Republics. Obi is building an affordable Android phone for the developing world.

Given the history of Android and Google chairman Eric Schmidt, a one-time Apple board member, we can only imagine what Steve Jobs would think of that.