Reverse takeover by Simon Hackett?
iiNet CEO Michael Malone resigns
Michael Malone has resigned his position as chief executive officer of Australia's third-most-subscribed-to internet service provider iiNet. Malone's story is Australia's very own technology fairy tale: he founded the company in his parents' garage in 1993 and led the company to its current position as a listed entity with …
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Friday 21st March 2014 01:57 GMT Tim99
Tech CEO
It was good to have a CEO who actually knew what the company did.
In the early days I was trying to set up Exchange on a MS Small Business Server for a customer on a Saturday morning. It needed to connect to iinet's mail server using multiple dial-up lines. After wading through the unhelpful MS documentation and studying iinet's recommended server settings I still could not get it to work. I phoned iinet tech support. A pleasant young man said that he did not have the information immediately to hand as he thought that we were the first people in Western Australia to do this, and could he phone me back in a few minutes? It was Michael Malone. He phoned back a few minutes later and ran me through many settings (not those in the MS documentation) and 30 minutes later everything worked. I told him that I would be on site for another couple of hours setting up client workstations and he phoned back an hour or so later to check that everything was OK.
He might not have been the bean-counter/spreadsheet-jockey business background Suit that some people expect from the CEO of a large company, but he did know how his products worked and how to treat a customer.
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Friday 21st March 2014 15:01 GMT silent_count
The cynic in me says that standing up to AFACT was a PR move on iinet's part but, regardless of motivation, what matters is that they did do the right thing by their customers. I can't imagine that any other Australian ISP would have done anything other than sell their customers out. All the best to Mr Malone and his family.
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Tuesday 25th March 2014 10:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
I'm sure the new CEO will lack the balls Malone had to focus his company on what matters to society (as well as customers and Net Promoter Score) over the company's short and medium term EBITDA.
If anything can drive profit, it is NPS, so it'll be interesting to see what the new CEO will do to replace the ballsy legal defence that used to differentiate iiNet's essence as a company from that of other ISPs.
Also what who now will stand in front of the monstrous wheels of corporate lobbyists' legislation and their ongoing impact on our society.
I'm yet to join the iiNet fold, but whether I do or not now probably depends on the new CEO not screwing it up...