Somehow, someway, my google RSS reader temporarily allowed me access to an interview of Amos Michelson by www.whattheythink.com. Unfortunately, it’s now been deemed “premium content” so I can’t link to it, or even re-read it anymore.

I read the interview with great interest as I worked at Creo from 1997 to 2004, during the boom and bust years. I knew Amos personally, but that is not saying much, as Amos interacted with many employees during his tenure. That was part of his charisma. Mention his name around the industry and you will get a lot of feedback, not all of it positive. But for most of the years that I worked at Creo, he was accessible and engaged with the employees.

Quick how many times has the CEO said hello to YOU at the organization where you work? Yeah, I thought so. That’s one of the things I noticed when I left Creo and consulted at a few other companies, was where the heck were the leaders? With one exception (Bell Canada, surprisingly enough), they were all hiding in the boardroom. I’ll never forget a meeting I had with a CIO that lasted for a painful 45 minutes. We were supposed to planning an event that would engage all layers of the organization to focus on the future of IT… blah, blah, blah. Anyways, it was obvious after a few minutes that she didn’t care a rat’s behind for anything except for looking good in the front of the CEO. Creating value? No. Motivating employees, who cares? Kissing senior executive butt? Check.

She wouldn’t have lasted 30 days at the old Creo where I used to work. But I am digressing.

The real reason that I am writing this post is because if you google thermal, Amos Michelson, Ken Spencer, and Dan Gelbart, you get this Kodak press release. It’s okay, but it’s still a press release and is that all there is? I thought that somebody would have written a book about Creo by now.

Dan Gelbard was the engineer who designed the thermal laser head, and it was such a good design that even five years after entering the market, the billion-dollar competitors to Creo (like Agfa and Fuji) struggled to match the specs. Ken Spencer was the co-founder with Dan of Creo, and chief architect of the Creo culture that attracted the best engineering talent on the West Coast to come and work at Creo.

Amos was the money-man, the rainmaker who brought in the business and made sure the bills got paid. He was also a tremendous negotiator, getting Creo some sweet deals like with Kodak and Heidelberg but it also got him into trouble sometimes (like with Printcafe). I remember his favourite saying: “Yeah, you’ve got create value but you have to capture value as well.”

It is still a bit unbelievable that Creo managed to go as far as it did. In the nineteen nineties, the big prepress companies had compiled a unbelievable number of dirty tricks to keep the small innovative companies from succeeding. One trick was to approach a small company and offer to be its distributor for a world region, let’s say Europe. Small company agrees, thinking that now the big company will do the heavy lifting to penetrate a new market. Wrong.

Big company orders a few machines, sticks them in a backroom somewhere and lets them rot or tries to reverse-engineer the components. Small company is screwed as they signed an exclusive agreement for X number of years that the big company is the exclusive distributor for that region for small company products. Creo got screwed a couple of times in the early years before Amos wised up and started to play hardball.

Another trick is the bald-faced lie that the company’s product simply don’t work. In the mid-nineteen nineties, Creo already had hundreds of working installations of CTP thermal. Feedback from the customer base was tremendous, our customers were making money hand over fist. Meanwhile, our competitors (one in particular) were posting messages to the forums saying that thermal basically didn’t work, or wasn’t ready for primetime, or whatever. That’s when Creo got the reputation for being arrogant, as outraged Creo engineers posted back on the forums that competitors X were basically full of s—.

Well, we may have been arrogant, but we were also right. And who the bleep uses violet nowadays?

Anyways, that’s my tribute piece for today. Hope you are enjoying your semi-retirement Amos, and making lots of money investing in solar panels.