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."

Should have stayed in Brussels

[laurensv]

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.

Re:Spindler was ahead of his time

[AKAImBatman]

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.

There's a reason he's forgotten

[diamondsw]

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.

Re:Spindler was ahead of his time

[ktappe]

Watch what happens when in a year from now apple hand out press releases to another Special Event and nobody turns up.

You're kidding, right? The exact opposite is currently happening. Earlier this week Apple quietly released Boot Camp and the industry has been going absolutely gaga over it. AAPL jumped nearly 10% on this product alone. Imagine the type of press if it'd been released at a Jobs dog & pony show. There is absolutely no sign that Steve's reality distortion field is weakening in the slightest. On the contrary; it seems to be working even when he doesn't show up. Apple's mojo is stronger than ever. I don't know what company you were referring to in your post, but it sure wasn't Apple.

-Kurt

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Bazooka Bob, eh?

[wilgaa]

Yeah, and Spindler was the the one whose 'last straw' was:

1. Curving his hand like he was holding a can of Pepsi.
2. Putting his hand around his mouth.
3. Blushed, and went "Bzzzzzzzzzzh!"

And yes, folks, to add insult to injury, that was a coporate party!!! He embarassed the ENTIRE staff!!!

That was (or at least one of) the straws that resulted in him being replaced by Amelio.

How ironic, isn't it, then, that you had the cycle of:

1. Sculley (Coke)
2. Spindler (Pepsi)
3. Amelio (Coke)

Oh, and I bet they during each tenure, the soda machines were of the company of which the CEO had previously work for.

Re:Says who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thomas Hormby is a high school student at Hume-Fogg Academic Magnet High School [mnps.org] in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is a member of the Hume-Fogg Technology Society [mnps.org].

He maintains two Mac history websites, MLAgazine [mlagazine.com] (not updated since June 2005) and macreate.net [macreate.net] (suspended by ISP). Slashdot gave him a post [slashdot.org] that pointed to his MLAgazine in May 2005. He is a frequent contributor to OSViews [osviews.com], OSNews and OSOpinion.

And you're right, the little bastard needs to source his stories. Christ. At least he can look forward to a bright future in journalism.

Re:Should have stayed in Brussels

[laurensv]

No, but if you have ever been to the Apple Expo in Paris,
you'd find 1/2 of all the booths are for intended for the frenchspeaking general public of Paris (and France).
Workshops most of the time are in English, but some are in French.
Oh and the organistion is also a la francaise (not that good ;-))

Re:Well now...

[anticypher]

Apple didn't know how to move funds from California to Belgium.

It's not as easy as many american companies think. I've seen Cisco, MTV, CNN, and a few other big american corps screw up the openings of their European HQs because they didn't pay the right law firm up front to do all the paper work and hire the legal minimum of locals. It was really bad during the dotcom boom, because companies flush with investment capital would just send a couple of guys they hired straight out of university (with zero work experience) and give them titles of "VP of European Operations" or "Head of European Sales", and the guys would end up working out of a hotel room for a few months because they didn't know enough to hire some locals. On at least two occasions they would try to hire me, since I had both European and American bank accounts. They'd want me to get all the payroll and expenses sent to my US account, and then distribute the money from my Belgian account to all their new partners. I'd say NO, and they had to fold up their operations because they just couldn't understand there were steep start up costs in Europe and they weren't willing to pay. Even when everything is set up, the banks sit on money transfers for a month or two, until a year's worth of funds go through with no problems.

the AC

Re:Spindler was ahead of his time

[vought]

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