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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."
I said it once and I'll say it again Spindler was a man ahead of his time. His methods did not suit the old apple of the time 100% but I can see his sense of strategy working in the current climate at apple. Even the iPod would be better off if treated like the newtons, something the purists wouldn't like but would lead to better for the company
for what I see Jobs ideas is getting old and they wont keep apple up together. Watch what happens when in a year from now apple hand out press releases to another Special Event and nobody turns up. Spindler had this long term strategy and Jobs sadly lacking there.
From the article: "Often times, he would hold an unintelligible meeting and walk out without taking questions, then allow his assistants to move in and explain what he had said."
Sounds to me like his assistants are the ones who deserve a lot of credit for his sucess- the guy would have been worthless without people to 'translate' for him.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Where the heck does he get this stuff? If he gets it from other people's books or articles (my guess), he needs to credit them, if only so we can evaluate the quality of the information. But this history contains no cites of any kind.
If Hormby is actually gatherting the information himself, through interviews or a large cache of secondary sources, he needs to explain this now and again in the text. For example, instead of "It was at DEC where Spindler gained a reputation for his work ethic," he could state "It was at DEC where Spindler proved he could work hard, a friend said."
This is the kind of vague, uncited, unsourced "information" that gives the Web a bad name. If it is coming from an established brand like nytimes.com, maybe (_maybe_) we could take their word for certain details. But if our only basis for judging this guy is his gmail address, we need more specifics on his information gathering.
Jean Louis Gassee sounds like a more interesting character in the Apple saga. An outrageous Frenchman who wore leather pants and was completely power mad. I love the stories of the infighting as well, as Gassee and others would rip Sculley behind his back and then deny it to his face.
Gassee really screwed up trying to develop his own RISC processor and his DRAM debacle showed him the door.
How come this type of biography seems only to be available for Apple? What about Cisco or Microsoft? Is anybody doing an inside blog of the cutthroat politics of Google? When they announced a Dutch Auction for their IPO, Wall Street practically launched a smear campaign against the company to protest their lack of first dibs. I bet that has some great stories behind it.
Michael Who?
Spindler is not "forgotten". People who were Apple customers and employees at that time will never forget him, and still curse his name to this day. Spindler had no idea what he was doing, no sense of vision, and no understanding of what it was any of the departments under him were doing. Under his "leadership" Apple drifted around like an untillered ship. Fascinating and groundbreaking technologies were fumbled due to lack of marketing or lack of management and either disappeared, or were coopted by Microsoft, on a constant basis. Revise history all you like, but Spindler as CEO was the worst thing to ever happen to Apple and Apple is extremely fortunate to have survived his tenure at all.
No, Spindler was asleep while the company went truly to hell.
Whatever he was, he certainly wasn't asleep.
What he got from Sculley was a company where every first-line manager did whatever they damn well pleased. Apple was unmanageable, and the stress of trying to keep it alive nearly killed him. He didn't get a lid on it, Amelio didn't get a lid on it, and frankly, nobody could have until the company was on the brink.
Steve didn't fire nearly as many people as the pundits would have you believe, and nearly all the people he did fire should have been shown the door many years earlier.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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."
Give me a break. Ya go down to your bank and do a wire transfer. Was Apple so stupid that someone couldn't have done that? I'd guess that they *did* know how and the author didn't get his facts straight.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Accenture was spun off in 1989, before the Enron scandal. Andersen was obliterated. Even if one agrees that everyone at Andersen deserved to lose their jobs over the actions of a handful of auditors and managers*, people should at least stop pretending that Accenture's existence means it didn't happen.
* What I've never understood is why the conventional wisdom is that Enron, which was a shell game from top to bottom, had a handful of criminals running it and everyone else was a victim, but everyone at Andersen, 99.9% of whom had nothing at all to do with Enron, deserved to lose their jobs.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Exactly. During Spindler's tenure we got:
The years between 1995 and 1997 was the perfect storm for Apple. Lousy products, lousy leadership, and Microsoft's exploitation of Apple's failures almost killed Apple. You can thank Spindler for starting the mess. (A lot of people want to blame Gil Amelio for these problems, but Amelio did the best that he could to solve them and he did bring Jobs back). The best thing about Spindler is that he was kicked out and replaced with Amelio, who was then kicked out and replaced with Steve Jobs. Now the company is successful again and making great products.
This was made with an automatic complaint generator.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
To "military intelligence" and "jumbo shrimp" and other such oxymorons, you can add "mob justice".
News media works on mob justice principles and are unbelievably klutzy with their accusations and witch hunts. I'm not inclined to blame "the American people" because most people have better things to do with their time than dig into exactly which employees are guilty, but the media could have been a bit more careful. But hey, it's not their lives wrecked.
You have the dates and the facts right, but the names wrong. Or something like that.
Anderson Consulting was spun off from Arthur Anderson in 1989. They renamed themselves to Accenture in early 2001 to avoid paying "royalties" for the Anderson name and nothing to do with Enron, which declared bankruptcy in late 2001. Very coincidental timing.
I don't think everyone at Enron deserved to lose their jobs, just like everyone one at Arthur Anderson didn't deserve to lose their jobs either. But, Enron was a huge customer of Anderson's, and I don't see how the higher ups at there could have not known about it.
Anderson's job was first and foremost to validate the honesty of Enron's financial statements and was therefor afforded a priviledged position. That firm existed solely to protect American financial markets and it failed, utterly. So yes, the firm did have to be destroyed, because it did not do its job. Sucks for the people that work there, but, what was at stake was the stability of the entire US economic system. Were investors to decide that American stock markets were full of lies on financials and withdraw, the result would have been disasterous for the US economy. Thank god the triple combination of healthy dividend tax cuts, sarbanes oxely requirements, and vigorous action by the AG to actually seek real jail time for anyone guilty of financial fraud has restored our markets somewhat to the level they were at before this disaster. It could have been a lot worse, and, the Bush administration actually deserves some credit for handling this one fairly well.
This is my sig.