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T A B L E__T A L K

Multiplayer gaming on the Net: Are you addicted? Share your tales in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

The Quicken and the deadbeat
By Andrew Leonard
How Intuit and Microsoft are saving us all from bankruptcy and crushing personal debt. Or not
(04/09/98)

Dear author
By Pamela LiCalzi O'Connell
What happens when a novelist puts his e-mail address on the book jacket?
(04/08/98)

Popcorn with your operating system?
By Scott Rosenberg
Microsoft beams its vision of computing's future into your local multiplex
(04/07/98)

Gene blues
By Jeffrey Obser
Why you should think twice before betting your life on genetic testing
(04/06/98)

21st Challenge No. 7 Results
By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau
Virtual gyms, calculator implants and other bright ideas for techno-schools
(04/03/98)

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BROWSE THE
21ST ARCHIVES

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______A ^{P P L E__A N D__T H E__S N A K E}

GIL AMELIO'S PEEVISH CORPORATE MEMOIR PAINTS STEVE JOBS AS THE DEVIL -- AND AMELIO HIMSELF AS AN INNOCENT CASUALTY.
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[ 2 1 S T_B O O K S ]

BY SCOTT ROSENBERG
Gil Amelio can't stop complaining in his new book, "On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple." He complains about his former subordinates at Apple -- executive underlings who failed to do his bidding. He complains about Apple's no-reserved-parking-space policy, which cost him precious minutes every morning, time he needed to accomplish the corporate turnaround he'd been hired to oversee. He complains about his compensation package, maintaining that Apple screwed him out of millions of dollars he was owed. He complains about the media, which shone a relentless and unflattering spotlight on his every move. Most of all he complains about Steve Jobs -- whom he accuses, credibly, of leading a boardroom coup to depose him.

Maybe there's no way for an executive in Amelio's position -- fired by his board of directors only a year and a half after they chose him to lead Apple out of its sea of red ink -- to write an account of his tenure as CEO without whining a little. But "On the Firing Line" isn't just kvetchy; it's a work of colossal petulance. It never assembles a portrait, history or analysis of Apple that the general reader might find illuminating. But it keeps finding new ways to surprise you with its clumsiness, smarminess and superficiality.

To be sure, there are a handful of behind-the-scenes revelations that Apple followers will eat up: a portrait of CFO Joseph Graziano breaking down in tears on a corporate jet flight home from the board meeting at which he'd been fired; a tale of an Apple user in Japan whose Apple monitor exploded, burning down part of his house; a picture of the backstage chaos at Amelio's disastrously rambling Macworld keynote in January 1997; and accounts of celebrities like Whoopi Goldberg who'd call up Amelio's office for help obtaining Powerbooks that were in short supply. (When Amelio heard that SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt was calling, he freaked out, fearing some kind of ethics inquiry; it turned out Levitt was just checking in as a Mac fan.)

But "On the Firing Line" seems incapable of knitting its Apple anecdotes together into a narrative of broader significance. It may give readers a sense of the chaotic whirlwind Amelio dived into when he took over Apple's reins, but it offers little in the way of retrospective insight. As co-written by William L. Simon "from over 100 hours of conversation" with Amelio, it's also full of minor errors, misspelled names and technical goofs. In this, at least, it resembles the kind of products Apple was shipping when Amelio arrived to clean house in January 1996.

At that low point in its history, Apple's financial, organizational, technical and public-relations problems were legion. "On the Firing Line" reports scattered triumphs and defeats, as the new CEO fends off low-ball purchase offers for the company from Sun, persuades Apple's creditors to roll over the company's debt, lays employees off and tries to rescue the long-mired effort to upgrade the Mac operating system. But if Amelio ever thought out a long-term strategy, he fails to share it in his book: Though he describes his team's heroic efforts to prepare a White Paper that charted Apple's future course, he never tells his readers what that paper actually said.

N E X T_P A G E | If Jobs is Hamlet, who does that make Amelio?