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LowEndMac have published a long, detailed look at the career of former Apple CEO Michael Spindler, who succeeded John Sculley in 1993, until he was replaced by Gil Amelio. Spindler, known as 'The Diesel', had a long and varied career both within and outside Apple, but he is probably the least remembered, and one of the shortest-lived of the elite list of those who have run the Cupertino company. Spindler's mistakes were not all of his own making, but he arrived in the CEO's chair at a propitious moment: the launch of PowerPC Macs, which were an instant success. But he also had to face the mammoth challenge of Windows 95, and he bore the blame for the fallout that ensued at Cupertino. It was the financials that did Spindler in: there was $1 billion in unsold product, one ninth of Apple's annual turnover; inventory would have to be dumped. Profits disappeared and balance sheets began bleeding red ink. Not that all the blame was Spindler's; CFO Joe Graziano burned a cool $50 million one year in currency speculation misjudgments. But the Mac OS was aging, and System 7.5 suffered from a need for constant bug fixes. A new or revamped OS strategy wasn't available and Spindler and the team seemed frozen in the face of the Windows 95 juggernaut. The only apparent answer to the problem was to do what Apple had failed to do in 1985: license the 'crown jewels' - the Mac OS - to clone makers. Many firms did license Mac OS, the most successful of which was Power Computing. But despite the scheme, which kept PowerBooks in Apple-only hands, the clones did not expand market share; they simply ate into Cupertino's fat profit margins. Worse still, they began to produce better machines - like the multiprocessor Daystar Genesis. Take a read of the article if you want a quick primer - or you just have a general interest - in the not-so-distant history of Apple. You'll find it more of a soap opera than Passions.
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