Former Apple chief urges firms to adapt to cloud computing era or face extinction
June 12, 2012
Businesses must adapt to the huge growth of cloud computing services in order to ensure they do not fall by the wayside, according to the former chief executive of Apple, John Sculley.
Speaking at the Cloud Computing World Forum in London, Sculley, who oversaw Apple for 10 years between 1983 and 1993, said the huge growth of cloud computing is causing technological innovations on an exponential scale, far beyond the predictable Moore’s law of innovations.
"Businesses have to adapt to changing environments in order to survive. There are many examples of corporations that were great in one era but not in another. Kodak was a great firm in one era, but now it’s bankrupt," he said…
"In large corporations it’s very easy to sit on what you have and preserve it but the opportunities now are all about disruption, about taking advantage of the huge growth opportunity that cloud computing technology offers."
He added that it’s important for firms to create a culture where middle managers are empowered to say yes to new ideas, rather than instinctively saying no to new, different ideas.
Sculley also touted the growth of big data and analytics as huge new areas that businesses must also embrace due to the benefits they can offer, particularly in areas such as sales, healthcare and insurance.
"There is a real opportunity around big data analytics as it offers the ability use statistics for building probability models that can anticipate what things could be through machine learning on a scale that was unimaginable even a few years ago," he said.
Sculley’s talk came the day after his former firm announced several new MacBook devices and unveiled plans for its iOS 6 update that sets to hit iPad and iPhone devices later this year.