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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
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Amelio prides himself on his executive acumen, his pragmatism and his devotion to the study of corporate process. Yet the self-portrait he paints here is one of a business leader woefully unprepared for the demands of the job. He seems to have arrived expecting vice presidents to jump whenever he sent out a memo, and responds with shock and hurt when they instead drag their feet at each of his demands for change. It's as if everyone in Silicon Valley knew about Apple's dysfunctional organization except Gil Amelio. Hell, he'd only been on the company's board of directors; what could he have known?

From the start, Amelio is distressed to realize that his every move and statement will be pored over by the press: "I resented sorely the fact that I was coerced into becoming highly sensitized about the way I spoke -- especially to representatives of the media." The slings and arrows of journalists still smart, apparently. "On the Firing Line" dedicates several pages to settling Amelio's scores with individual reporters.

Hurt innocence is a pose that may make Amelio feel good, but it's hardly appropriate for a guy who was being paid a $990,000 salary (even after Apple's lawyers chewed down his stock benefits and bonuses) to nurse an ailing $10 billion company back to health. Apparently, it had never before occurred to this seasoned corporate leader that the fate of an iconic institution like Apple is shaped more by public perceptions than by objective fact.

Late in the story, Amelio finally realizes: "There's a subjective element in the way people react to Apple having very little to do with how good the products are, and a lot to do with what they read in the newspapers and how comfortable they are with the state of the company." For Amelio this is apparently a "Eureka!" kind of insight, but for anyone who follows the technology industry it's more like a "duh" moment -- and "On the Firing Line" has a lot of them.

The only genuinely fascinating aspect of the book is its one-sided version of the psychodrama that unfolded between Amelio and Jobs. As Amelio tells it, Jobs is a Machiavellian-genius snake, with a politician's ability to turn on the charm even as he's plotting a back stab. The book provides plenty of venomous details to back up that image. The board meeting that ousted Amelio and replaced him with Jobs took place on the July 4 weekend of 1997; only three weeks before, Amelio writes, he and his wife had shared a fine vegetarian dinner with Jobs and his wife, like old friends.

In Amelio's view, there is some kind of fate at work in the two men's intertwined paths. A prologue tells of a meeting between Jobs and Amelio before Amelio became Apple CEO, when he was still running National Semiconductor and serving on Apple's board. It seems that Jobs, who'd been exiled in 1985 from the company he founded, wanted to return to Apple's command post, and tried to enlist Amelio as his champion. Amelio rebuffed him -- and now wonders whether that meeting turned Jobs into his implacable foe.

Certainly, that's possible. But it seems more likely that to Jobs, Amelio was a mere pawn in the way, a minor character to be disposed of so the main drama -- "Exiled Silicon Valley Prophet Returns to His People" -- could proceed. In a pretentiously cloying stab at literary quality that backfires hilariously, "On the Firing Line" keeps inserting Shakespearian references into its narrative and its chapter titles. Amelio gets as far as identifying Jobs -- who to this day remains Apple's "interim CEO" and won't commit to the job for the long haul -- as an indecisive Hamlet. What Amelio never seems to realize is that, in this particular Apple tragedy, his role was that of a Rosencrantz or Guildenstern.

As "On the Firing Line" concludes, Amelio is still lashing out at Jobs -- reporting, for instance, Jobs' creative solution to the executive parking problem: He pulls his Mercedes into the handicapped spaces. You don't know which to feel worse about -- Jobs' exhibitionist arrogance, or Amelio's need to take the peevish revenge of telling us about it.
SALON | April 10, 1998

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E-mail Scott Rosenberg.

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B O O K++I N F O R M A T I O N:
"ON THE FIRING LINE: MY 500 DAYS AT APPLE"
BY GIL AMELIO AND WILLIAM L. SIMON | HARPER BUSINESS | 298 PAGES

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R E L A T E D ++A R T I C L E S:
Silicon Valley's cults of personality: New books about Apple, Oracle and Intel. (12/18/97)

Amelio's fan dance: At Macworld, Apple CEO's slow windup to an operating-system pitch. (01/07/97)