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."

Spindler was ahead of his time

[Saven Marek]

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.

Sounds like an interesting character...

[paladinwannabe2]

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.

Says who?

[DysenteryInTheRanks]

The website Low End Mac says this article was written by "avid history buff" Tom Hormby. Hormby may be a buff, but clearly he is no historian.

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.

How aboutthe Frenchman?

[GPLDAN]

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.

I think I speak for everyone when I say

[commodoresloat]

Michael Who?

Spindler nearly killed Apple

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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Bullshit meter banging off scale

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

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.

Re:wages

[Otter]

Andersen Consulting (no, I won't use that stupid name they came up with to try to live down the Enron scandal).

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.

MOD PARENT UP

[linguae]

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.

Exactly. During Spindler's tenure we got:

• Pathetic computers (such as the Power Mac x200 series [lowendmac.com] and the infamous PowerBook 5300 [lowendmac.com]). I just so happen to own a Performa 6220 (acquired through somebody giving it to me about a few years ago, along with a Mac SE. I like the SE better.). The architecture is so messed up, it couldn't even support a 28Kbps or faster serial port modem! That machine is currently collecting dust in a closet back home.
• Copland disaster. 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 (OS X didn't really become stable until late 2002, IIRC). No wonder why Microsoft made a huge gain in marketshare during these years; I'd take Windows 2000 (or, heck, Windows 98) over Mac OS 9 any day.
• Corporate infighting. Imagine all of the nice Apple products out there had they succeeded.

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.

Re:Ex-apple employee here

[Millenniumman]

This was made with an automatic complaint generator [pakin.org].

Re:How aboutthe Frenchman?

[mccalli]

How come this type of biography seems only to be available for Apple?

If you like this kind of stuff, you might be interested in On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore [commodorebook.com]. 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

Re:wages

[Jerf]

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.

Re:wages

[SumoRoach]

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.

Sucks, but they did deserve to get fired

[tjstork]

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.

Re:Spindler was ahead of his time

[MsGeek]

I said it once and I'll say it again Spindler was a man ahead of his time.

Gott in himmel, you are WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.

Herr Spindler almost augured Apple into the ground. More Road Apples [lowendmac.com] came out during his regime than any other CEO of Apple.

It took the combined heavy lifting of Gil Amelio (the true unsung hero who saved Apple from the shitter) and The Steve to get Apple out of the rut Spindler put it in. Sculley sent it on this trajectory, but it was Spindler who put it into a power dive.

Spindler's place in Apple history is assured: the guy who nearly killed the company.