The Forgotten Apple CEO

Sabah Arif writes "Michael Spindler was supposed to be the savior of Apple. After four years at Apple, he was an executive vice president and had built Apple Europe to the point where it was providing 25% of Apple's revenues. Just the same, at the end of the day Spindler couldn't handle the stress or control the Apple organization. Low End Mac has an extensive biography of this figure in Apple's History." From the article: "Apple Europe ran out of a cramped 100 ft. office in Brussels and had only a few employees. Spindler had never worked at the startup before, but he liked it a lot. He had freedom to try almost anything he wanted. There were problems with working for such a young company, though. Spindler went without payment for almost six months because Apple didn't know how to move funds from California to Belgium."

Comments

wages

[SuperBanana]

Spindler went without payment for almost six months because Apple didn't know how to move funds from California to Belgium.

This reminds me...Just FYI as a sort of public announcement for slashdotters since I hear on a fairly regular basis from techies who don't get paid timely, especially with startups: there are a lot of laws people don't know about regarding payroll. For example, in Massachusetts (and probably a number of other states) is not just a civil matter, it's a -criminal- one as well!

If you work in MA:

• You must be paid bi-weekly if you're salaried, and you have to be paid within 6 days of that period. There are no acceptable excuses for delays, period, end of discussion- even if the Treasurer is stricken with some mystery disease and can't write checks, that's the company's problem- not yours.
• If you are terminated, fired, laid off, down-sized, whatevered- you MUST BE PAID WITHIN THE FOLLOWING DAY FOR ANY AND ALL WAGES. Your employer cannot make excuses about deducting wages for expenses, petty cash you borrowed, calculating taxes, or whatever; that's all stuff they should have done before letting you go. No excuses about "oh, we only cut checks on tuesdays" or "we only cut payroll checks from our _____ location" - well then, they should have picked tuesday to let you go, and had the check sent ahead. Terminations are rarely spur of the moment "gee, I think I'll fire Bob in 30 minutes." They're decisions made over days, not hours or minutes.
• Violating wage-related laws is a CRIMINAL matter and the CEO, CFO, VP's, etc can be criminally charged if the DA's office is interested enough (ie, several of you are locked out, for example, with back-wages.)
• You can ask the DA's office to pursue the matter, OR pursue it privately- your choice (ie, you're not at the whim of a DA who can't be bothered.)
• Your employer is liable for TREBLE DAMAGES PLUS LEGAL EXPENSES (ie, triple whatever the amount is in question.) Not that you should be taking advantage of employers for the tiniest infraction, but this is a great way to have a sweeter taste in your mouth if you've been given the boot.

IANAL, blah blah, might be wrong about some points, blah blah. Full details on the Massachusetts Unfair Wage Payment Act.

You also might be interested to know that quite a number of jobs are excluded from "independent contractor status", specifically because employers use them to get around having to pay social security taxes, benefits, etc. These MA laws are on top of the IRS rules limiting what employees can be considered independent contractors

Re:wages

[CaveMike]

To be more precise: Arthur Anderson and Anderson Consulting became peer partnerships in 1989. In 1998, Anderson Consulting sued Arthur Anderson for breach of contract, and in 2000 Anderson Consulting was broken off and renamed Accenture. But you're right, it had nothing to do with Enron. Anderson Consulting had long felt like they were being dragged down by the accounting half. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture

Re:wages

[kma100]

Nope. Andersen Consulting and Arthur Andersen were sister partnerships under the Andersen Worldwide umbrella. There was a growing tension between the two organizations as AC had to pay an annual fee to the AA (audit) partners. In the 90's, the consulting business was growing very rapidly compared to the audit and tax business, and the annual fee got to be very large. At the same time AA starting building up their consulting practice, so AC was in essense subsidising its own competition.

In 1999, AA took AC to court and charged that AC owed them $11 billion in damages. When the dust had cleared, AC paid AA a breakup fee (far less than the $11B) and agreed to reliquish the Andersen name. AC then rebranded as Accenture and went public and AA became "Andersen".

Accenture wasn't involved with the Enron scandal. While Andersen took the impact and disintegrated, not everyone lost their jobs. Parts of Andersen were sold off to other consulting companies or were spun off on their own.

Mr. "Road Apple"

[rxmd]

Spindler was the man behind several Road Apples, crippled Apple models that the company isn't particularly proud of.

Basically, with the pressure to produce low-cost Apple models, Apple stripped high-end designs in retarded ways (such as the narrow data bus on the Classic II which made it 30% slower than the SE/30 released several years earlier) or designed new models by producing technically absurd add-ons to older models (like the Performa 5200 that was basically the motherboard from one of the last 32-bit 680x0 series with a 64-bit PowerPC 603 on top of it that ran at half the effective clock speed and all the multiplexing on the resulting two 32-bit system buses had to be done by the CPU in software). Definitely suboptimal, and Apple fans today aren't particularly fond either to remember these all-time lows in Apple product history.

What a shitty article

[diamondsw]

There are so many things in there on the PowerPC development period that are just plain WRONG. There were two primary projects during this period - Jaguar and Cognac. Jaguar was a whole new platform, new OS, etc, that would have no backwards compatibility. Cognac was a classic Apple skunkworks, working on the dynamic 68K emulator that allowed a smooth transition. When Cognac succeeded and had a demo welcoming people to try and "break the emulator" (which succeeded extremely well), the Jaguar project was cancelled.

Meanwhile, the idea that "all we got from Copland was the nanokernal and text encoding" is just bullshit. Open Transport, Appearance Manager, HFS+, the nanokernal (which was only somewhat used), V-Twin (which became the early Sherlock) - hell, almost all of the API's we got from 7.6 through 8.6 were pulled from the Copland work.

(Of course, what does any of this have to do with Spindler? Not sure here either.)

Re:Spindler was ahead of his time

[AKAImBatman]

From Wikipedia:

During Amelio's tenure, Apple's stock hit a 12-year low, and in the second quarter of 1997, the company lost $708 million. Amelio was widely criticized as lacking vision and marketing ability. Many did not appreciate his "wooziness" (Ed Fullenmauker 1997). Board member Ed Woolard announced his termination on July 4, 1997, and Amelio left the company the next day. He was replaced by Steve Jobs.

Showing a 10 year graph on BigCharts, reveals that the peak of the stock price is in 2006.

2005 revenues were 13.93 billion, whereas the historical revenues for Amelio's time show a peak of 11 billion.

I don't know where you're getting your information, but I certainly can't corroborate it.

Pay and IT

[JohnCC]

I think the IT industry must be unique in the way that they are always late paying their staff yet most companies have the know-how to knock-up and el-cheapo payroll system. All the IT jobs I've worked in are late payers and have to be frequently reminded that the money they are spending on luxeries and lunches is actually my salary. Is anyone here in the IT industry (particulary programming) and paid on-time?

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[squiggleslash]

Apple could have destroyed Microsoft and Windows 95 with a real, modern Mac operating system like what Copland promised. But delays after delays stalled the project until it was finally cancelled. It would be interesting to see what a modern, non-Unix (and non-Windows) GUI OS looks like, but Apple completely rested on their laurels here, and users were stuck with crashy and ancient OS 7, 8, and 9 until 2001

Well, hold on a moment. Yes, it'd be interesting to see what "a modern, non-Unix (and non-Windows) GUI OS looks like", but Copland wasn't, even in 1995, "a real, modern Mac operating system", not even in terms of what Copland promised.

Copland was actually cruder than OS/2 and Windows 95. While it had "pre-emptive multitasking" on the bullet list, applications that interacted with the user (that is to say, pretty much all of them) had to run in the same process, called the Blue Box, which happened to look to applications a lot like Mac OS 7. An application developer who cared could split out the GUI part of their app from the rest of it, putting only the GUI/interactive part in the "Blue Box", but beyond that, you couldn't isolate your application completely from the rest of the system. If Word's Blue Box part crashed in a zany way, just as with Mac OS 7, every application would, essentially, die (what's the point in an interactive application running if the front end's dead?) Developers wanting to develop cross platform code for both Copland and OS 7 would find it easiest to forget about splitting out the code like that, and only the most conscientious developer (or one with very special needs) wouldn't write their code for an interactive application to run entirely in the Blue Box anyway.

The OS was also single user. Far from being able to "destroy" Microsoft and Windows 95, they'd have come up with a system that looked like an equal on a feature list, and was less stable and secure in practice.

Copland was never the write operating system for Apple. Indeed, Apple themselves portrayed it as a stepping stone towards Gershwin, which was supposed to be more of a next generation OS. But Gershwin was never started, its spec was always up in the air, and so it's hard to conclude what it might have looked like.

Re:Spindler was ahead of his time

[AKAImBatman]

I'm not sure I really understand the above. USB didn't come out until the late nineties, it's hardly Spindler's fault earlier Macs didn't come with it.

His point is that current Macs are easily identifiable by their hardware options. Instead of having massive matrices of complex features, Apple takes the stance of putting everything into the machine that belongs in a given price range. That means that you can look at an iBook, and unequivically say, "That's the 2 USB model running a G3 processor, and originally OS X 10.2." This makes several things a lot easier:

* Easier to produce hardware periperals for (e.g. memory upgrades, Wifi cards, etc.)
* Easier for customers to find the periperal they're looking for
* Easier to support
* Easier to produce parts for
* Easier to test software across all models
* Easier for customers to find the model they want, since only the MAJOR feature vary.
* Just all around easier for everyone involved.

modems were still relatively rare peripherals in the early nineties.

I'm not quite sure where you get that idea. Modems have been common since the 80's, especially once Compuserve took off. Those who weren't business users tended to use modems for accessing BBSes and public access computers. The Internet may not have caught on until around '94-'95, but there were a number of uses for modems before that. Leaving modems off their machines was a huge mistake.

This would seem to be backed up by the fact that the iMac, which clearly influenced everything Apple has done since,

1. The only thing left over from the iMac is the name. Apple has moved to very different designs that focus on ease of use and only the necessary options. The iMac was the first step toward today's designs, but it's incredibly different than what Apple puts out now.

2. The iMac was developed after Jobs returned to Apple. From Wikipedia:

Steve Jobs streamlined the company's large and confusing product lines immediately after becoming Apple's interim CEO in 1997; towards the end of the year, Apple trimmed its line of desktop Macs down to the beige Power Macintosh G3 series. Having discontinued the consumer-targeted Performa series, Apple needed a replacement for the Performa's price point. The company announced the iMac on May 7, 1998, and started shipping the iMac on August 15 of that year. The launch of the iMac was a landmark event for its time, and had a massive impact on both the company and the computer industry.