Philips is a $31B company with 40 lines of business. It's famous for research, but was having trouble getting products to market on time and at a low price. Research was languishing in the labs, software and military electronics divisions had been sold off, and -- after 70K layoffs, including 30% of research staff -- employees weren't willing to take risks. Then Philips hired Frank Carrubba, director of HP's research labs, to restructure its entire research and production cycle. Carrubba has introduced high-level screening of product ideas, long-term product plans, cross-divisional task forces, concurrent engineering, strategic milestones, and other HP-inspired innovations. R&D contracts with universities (including MIT) will reduce the need for research staff. [Jonathan B. Levine, BW, 9/6/93.]

Tandem's 10,000 employees have always enjoyed perks such as egalitarian management, profit sharing, beer blasts, retreats in Maui, seminars, sabbaticals, and a company pool. Their loyalty and hard work pushed Tandem to revenues of $1.9B in 1990, but now Stratus, Sequoia, and Digital are taking the market for open, fault-tolerant computers. Tandem has cut 1,800 employees, reduced pay by 5%, and ended its generous employee stock ownership program. There's nothing wrong with treating employees well, but "you shouldn't regard the trappings of success as the cause of success." [Dyan Machan, Forbes, 9/27/93.]

Borland is getting Wall Street flack for building a magnificent new campus. Many formerly frugal companies that succumb to "the Versailles syndrome" -- e.g., Trilogy, TeleVideo, Next -- are soon suffering losses. Construction takes attention away from business. [Julie Pitta, Forbes, 7/19/93.]

Albert Eisenstat's job at Apple has been restructured out of existence, and he is suing for a better severance deal than Apple offered. he has been earning $749K, plus bonuses totalling $760K in 1990-92. Eisenstat has been a board member since 1985 and EVP since 1987. He joined Apple in 1980 as general counsel and corporate secretary. [Linda Rohrbough, Newsbytes. Bill Park, 9/27/93.]

Quark XPress, an $895 desktop publishing program, is probably the third best-selling program for the Macintosh -- even though it's seldom advertised. The real money, though, is in networked software for publishers of newspapers, magazines, books, catalogs, and brochures. Quark Publishing System sells for up to $100K, or about $4K per seat. Publishers are eager to convert from Atex systems that start at $15K. Quark claims a pretax profit margin of 60% and has over $50M in cash. Founder Tim Gill likes to program, so he lets Farhad Fred Ebrahimi run the company. Ebrahimi's 1986 investment of $100K is now worth at least $250M. [Jeffrey Young, Forbes, 7/19/93.]