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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."
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.
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."
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...
If you like this kind of stuff, you might be interested in On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore. A very interesting read to anyone who was around at the time, in my case for the C64 and Amiga era - I missed out on the PETs.
The book talks about brushes with both Jobs and Woz as well - in fact it's significantly less than flattering to Apple and isn't exactly shining about Woz's ability as an engineer. I'm an Apple fan and have a number of their machines, but I've read enough positive things over the years to find it quite refreshing to read a negative view as well. The book is, to descend into cliche for a moment, a rattling good read.
Cheers,
Ian