On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple

Rating:
Summary: Apple Made a Big Mistake
Review: After reading this book, I came to a conclusion that Apple made a big mistake by getting rid of Amelio. The truth is, they could be a lot further along than they are, even today, had they not have made the descision to oust him from his post after only a year and a half. The book is written very well, and is a book that you can get through, and understand easily. There were not many typos that I noticed in the book. This is a must read for Apple fans, Windows fans, and businessmen alike.

Rating:
Summary: Apple Made a Big Mistake
Review: After reading this book, I came to a conclusion that Apple made a big mistake by getting rid of Amelio. The truth is, they could be a lot further along than they are, even today, had they not have made the descision to oust him from his post after only a year and a half. The book is written very well, and is a book that you can get through, and understand easily. There were not many typos that I noticed in the book. This is a must read for Apple fans, Windows fans, and businessmen alike.

Rating:
Summary: Kind of boring
Review: Amelio, even after 500 days of service, did not know about Apple. I find this book not exciting, and it failed to point out Apple's real issues: market share.

How funny that Steve Jobs also fails to bring Apple back. About three years after, the production of Macintosh is still a little higher or lower than 4 million units. Compare it to the world PC production of 100 million+ units, this is poor.

Apple's worst days are yet to come.

Rating:
Summary: I dunno....
Review: Amelio, who never caught my attention during his reign at Apple, has done an incredible job. He tells a story very personal and compelling. Reading between the lines, it is impossible to miss the advices for better management and leadership- like it or not. Whether it serves his purpose or not, the book emerges as a manual pulling together a remarkable analysis of power structures that persist in huge corporations. Whoever adores Jobs more than his own wife - don't buy this book. For someone who longs for another perspective, please go figure, for this story might tell the truth - whatever that is.

Whether cold facts are told or not, this piece is personal, and self-critical. I find it impossible to accuse someone to be "one-sided" when presenting his memoirs of the time at Apple.

Rating:
Summary: I can't help feeling sorry for the guy
Review: If what he says about Apple is true, and there are a number of people who say it's pure rubbish, I do feel sorry for Gil Amelio. He was terribly ill-suited for a top position at a "trendy" computer company because he's a older, geeky type of guy. Most of Gil's difficulty came from trying to adapt to the culture at Apple. Which was very different from National Semiconductor. While reading the opening chapters when Gil was being courted to take the CEO position I felt myself saying, "Don't do it Gil. You can't save Apple. You'll hate it there." The bottom line was the book was interesting and answered a lot of questions for me. I hope writing the book was cathartic for Gil because I really wonder if he can show his face in the valley again after all the blaming and bad mouthing that he did. One more thing, he must have kept a very serious journal of his tenure because the details of events and conversations that took place were amazing.

Rating:
Summary: The Man Who Saved Apple
Review: It is now clear why the best OS in the world didn't catch on. If the business fundamentals of a company are not sound, the company will lose marketshare and eventually...fail.

Here is a look into how Apple's loose corporate culture almost became it's undoing. This book proves that you can have all the talent in the world, but if there is no discipline and teamwork, it will all be for not. I had thought Gil's short tenure was due to incompetance....a stuffed shirt who was wrong for the job. I mean, Steve Jobs saved Apple...right?

Wrong. Gil was exactly what Apple needed. Apple had a rotten core of self-serving individuals. I find it incredible that Apple management would listen to Gil's order and then do nothing to act on them. His biggest failure was a failure not to kick their lazy butts out the door sooner! How can a business be run with everyone doing their own thing? And surprise...the sales people were only interested in achieving a certain quantity of sales even if it meant selling computers at such a low price that the company lost money on a per unit basis.

If you are into Apple and/or business turnaround stories, this is a great read. I could hardly put it down. Throw in Gil's encounters with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and you really get keen insight into the whole computer industry and the personalities of the industries biggest movers and shakers.

It is ironic that today so many credit Apple's turnaround to Steve Jobs. If you still believe that then you really need to read this book.

Rating:
Summary: A confession with lessons
Review: Net, I like the book and learn some good lessons for my business life.

The main purpose that I read this book is to learn some leadership skills, and I believe the best lessons you can learn is from real-life situations, instead of some abstract principles. and I believe not only can success provide good lessons, but failure can also be a great teacher, and most of the time I think failure is a better teacher than success. Within this book, I clearly saw Amelio's thinking and the issues he's facing along the 500 days. For instance, I found Amelio can quickly identify the top priority in the first two weeks of his new job. Then I reflect 'did I do that myself when I just got to a new position' And that gives me a good lesson.

For whether this book is one-sided or not, actually I don't know and don't care whether this story is objective or biased because I read it for my business/leadership learning. As long as I can get a clear picture of his perspective and his thinking behind his actions, then I can link all these to the business result and refer some lessons myself. I think that's good enough for me.

Net, I think this book clearly provided Amelio's personal perspective and the linkage between his thinking and action, and it provided some good lessons to me. Recommend it to all business managers/leaders.

Rating:
Summary: A remarkable mix of pompousity, stupidity, and spite
Review: On the plus side, there is a lot of unintential comedy in this book. Gil is very impressed with himself, as this from page 1 will show:

"Apple seemed a natural, considering my background as a Ph.D. technologist with a number of patents and my reputation as a business leader who had established a notable record for transforming ailing companies."

Whether this confidence was justified can be discerned in many places in the book, but I will always treasure this one from page 187:

"Solaris, on the other hand, is based on a programming language called Unix..."

For those not technical enough to be in on the joke, Unix is an operating system, not a programming language. While your average man-on-the-street might make this mistake, for a computer company CEO to make it is pretty funny/pathetic.

For those more into human emotion than technical humor, here is a lot of spite in here, mostly directed at Steve Jobs, as shown by this from page 269:

"The success I was creating threatened to get in the way of his plans. Betrayal, assassination, trashing of reputations are all part of the everyday tool kit of a person obsessed with power, control, or revenge."

Even as I type this I confess that I cannot even begin to imagine what success Gil is referring to: the billion dollar losses? the massive layoffs? the plunging sales?

As a bonus, the book has some fascinating contradictions. Take this from page 273, regarding the deal with Microsoft:

"Eager for a dramatic move, he [Steve] called Bill Gates and gave him the deal I wouldn't, handing over everything...But he failed to get the one essential element...Instead he settled for cash, a sum Microsoft could write a check for without blinking."

So Gil doesn't like the deal right? He thinks Apple got taken. But then there is this from the next page:

"It bristled me no end to read in the newspapers about Steve making a deal with Bill Gates, as if no groundwork had been laid"

Thus, we are left with the puzzling conclusion that Gil thinks it was a terrrible deal, and is very resentful that he got no credit for it.

To wrap up, I am conflicted about giving this book only one star, because there is genuine entertainment value in it, in much the same way that "Plan 9 from Outer Space" has entertainment value: as a dazzling bad instance of its type. Hopefully this review, independent of the rating, will give the reader a better idea as to whether or not this book is the type of reading material he will enjoy.

Rating:
Summary: The Man Who Saved Apple
Review: See Gil. See Gil run apple. See Gil get fired. Poor Gil.

This book has some interesting observations about apple culture, and a couple lessons for tech managers, but it's also full of self-congratulatory prose, with an occasional good dollop of self-pity. It's also written at around a 4th grade level - there were lots of opportunities for deeper analysis of what happened at apple, why Gil's strategies for turning the place around might have worked or might have failed, NeXT vs Be, and how apple changed as an organization. Unfortunately, Amelio and his co-author never delve into the details.

Rating:
Summary: Good reading but Amelio talks like an employee not a CEO.
Review: This book is a very easy read. You can finish it in a single sitting. It talks a lot about how business should be done but is not done. But as I read the book, I kept on wondering why Dr. Amelio talked and acted like a dissatisfied employee and did not take decisive actions like a CEO. He had things in his control, he was the CEO, he had as much power as a person in a company can have. Still his story is that in Apple no one listened to him! Probably, CEOs of our corporations do not possess as much power and control as we think they do.

I would like to see people like Amelio successful and I was sorry to read his account. I hope that his success at National was the reality and his failure at Apple was bad luck and not the other way round.