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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."
It's still sad that the European headquarters moved from Brussels to Paris.
Now the (european) Apple expo is held in Paris and is therefor deeply french, which leads to the UK and the Netherlands (and maybe others, I don't know) having their own unofficial apple expo's. Having stayed in Brussels, maybe the expo could have been held there and be truly European.
Apple didn't know how to move funds from California to Belgium.
Their paypal account was closed?
How do you work out of a 100 ft office? That's one-dimensional, which gets uncomfortable quite quickly.
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.
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.
So, Jobs' strategy of meeting the market's needs before they realize they have those needs is not a long term strategy? Methinks that you need a serious reality check.
Putting aside Spindlers abilities, Jobs has shown explosive growth in BOTH companies he currently acts as CEO for. (Apple and Pixar.) Under his reign, BOTH companies have continued to produce products that have continually upped their market share. Under Jobs, BOTH companies have continued this upward climb for decades. Sure, Jobs' tenure was broken up, but while he was CEO the company has always thrived.
Love him or hate him (probably some of both), he does a bang up job as an executive leader. There's no one I would trust more at the helm of Apple. Or any other company, for that matter.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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:
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
Please help metamoderate.
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.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
Sculley may have had misplaced visions or pushed things before their time (Newton, Knowledge Navigator, etc), but Spindler was just asleep at the wheel running Apple. Under Spindler is when the Copland project went completely out of control, hardware focus vanished (there were some months when Apple would release over a dozen different Mac models, with no clear differentiation), and focus and strategy on the "classic" Mac OS was non-existant. There were all of six people writing the Mac OS when Gil Amelio came in - everyone else was assigned to Copland. There were over 20 separate marketing departments. OS releases were being shipped late and buggier than ever - they had to recall 7.5.4, and Open Transport shipped as a beta, and was horribly unstable for its first year of "production use".
No, Spindler was asleep while the company went truly to hell. Amelio then came in with some business discipline, and Jobs finished the job with both vision and excellent execution.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
-Kurt
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
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.
why didn't he sell his Disney stock instead?
Probably because he doesn't have any Disney stock, and won't until the Pixar buyout closes. He's also prevented from selling his Pixar shares in the meantime.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.)
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
He has other assets he could sell or he could have gotten a low interest loan to cover the taxes till his Disney stock was released.
Why don't you send him your resume, and apply to be his financial advisor?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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
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.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Under Jobs, Apple has only once, in the most recent quarter, surpassed Gil Amelio's revenue record.
Respectfully, I have to wonder aloud if you aren't one of the better trolls on Slashdot.
I worked for Spindler, Amelio and Jobs.
Spindler shipped a LOT of product, and under him, the confusing gobbledygook of naming conventions like "Performa 6225" was born. Now, if you can tell me the difference between Performa 6220 and a 6225 off the top of your head...imagine what it was like in support when Apple had 40-some odd machines based on four logic boards and varying form factors, markets...
Actually, it was a lot like HP/Compaq's naming conventions these days - mention a product name, and you had to go look up the feature list, which sub-species of logic board, what processor speed, disk capacity, etc - and some machines had quiet revisions. A far cry from the 2X2 product matrix Jobs introduced and far removed even from today's multi-market, multi-tier product line.
Under Spindler, Apple shipped a lot of product though. Unfortunately, they were declining very fast in quality because Spindler was racing to the bottom, commanding engineering to ship low-cost products on schedule no matter the quality.
I remember the KROM (Apple sales comm. "radio show") tape in which the PowerBook product manager proudly crowed about how the 5300 series was going to ship on time, with features no PC laptop had. For the next eight years, Apple was replacing those machines - every 5300 took at least one ride to the service depot (I'm not exaggerating) and a great deal of them were repaired multiple times or outright replaced...with another 5300 that had bugs and needed repair. The product didn't actually work until six months after it shipped - and after it was already EOL'd. Thanks, Mike "Diesel" Spindler!
Spindler is best forgotten. Underhim we got the PowerBook 5300, Performa 52 and 62xx series, the Performa 6400 series, crappy peripherals that took several replacements at times to get a working unit, etc.
Amelio was the "fix it guy" who was supposed to turn us around with motivational talks, koffee klatches (yes, I really did work there) and a management team that included Silicon Valley's best...or at least the best who weren't smart enough to be working for startup Internet companies like Yahoo, Lycos, etc.
He flat-out told us during a comm meeting that we were stupid and lazy and generally tried to be the strict daddy for a company of people that he thought were just lazy slobs - people who, if they'd just cut their hair and wear a tie would somehow make the company sing again.
Needless to say, this didn't go over well with employees. Thank God Fred managed to eke a $25 Million profit one quarter from those "record revenues" Amelio generated. Apple was taking in lots of money - sure - just like a drowning person takes in a lot of water.
Fred and Steve were the only guys Amelio hired that ended up doing much good for Apple. Fred cut costs by NOT laying everyone off at once (this was after March 17, 1997) and Steve had the balls to knock a few walls out of our haunted mansion and start renovating.
Apple today may not sell as many computers, but they're far more influential and relevant because Jobs returned - and you can give Amelio that kudo if you want.
Under Jobs, Apple has only once, in the most recent quarter, surpassed Gil Amelio's revenue record. I think a fair way to look at Jobs is that he's a company builder and marketer whose ability to actually produce economic results is approximately on par with the best CEO from Apple's history.
Or, you could look at it this way: Amelio was so inept at fixing the damage Spindler wrought, stood by while the clone makers whupped Apple's ass, and drove so many smart people from the company that it has taken Jobs this much time and almost ten years' worth of focussed engineering effort to regain the former revenue level.
Perhaps it makes more sense when you consider that we were