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

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.