Durcan steps into the top post after Micron CEO Steve Appleton's death

EMPLOYEES AND EX-EMPLOYEES SPEAK

A memorable lunch

Tyler Vanderhoof, 35, an equipment engineer who has worked for Micron since 1997, won the opportunity to have lunch with his boss in 2007, as part of a reward program called “Suggestion of the Quarter.” It was such a big moment in Vanderhoof’s career that he displays photos of himself shaking hands with Appleton in his cubicle and in his kitchen at home. Vanderhoof was surprised at Appleton’s office, which he said wasn’t adorned in a way one might expect a CEO’s to be.

“You could tell he was down-to-earth,” Vanderhoof said Friday. “It wasn’t a lavish CEO office."

Ready to stop and talk

“In 20-plus years at Micron, I always felt that Steve was a great leader,” Bruce Ross, of Nampa, wrote Friday on the Statesman’s guestbook of readers’ memories of Appleton. “It impressed me that if we met in the hallway at the plant, he would stop and talk with me for a few minutes and ask me how things were going.”

Never forgot workers

“I appreciated the fact that Steve never forgot about the workers at Micron,” Gaylen Anderson wrote on the guestbook. “ He was never above anyone and always so approachable. A great leader who will be remembered more by how he interacted with people and not only by the brilliance of his work.”

Open-door policy

Sean Mahoney, media manager at Micron from 2001 to 2005, said Appleton had an open-door policy: Anyone in the company could stop in to see him. “Rarely would he not know the person’s name,” Mahoney said.

An engaging speaker

“Everyone hates meetings, but when Steve got up and spoke, you could listen for hours and not get bored,” said Peg Moran, who worked at Micron for 11 years. “He was very charismatic and quite the leader.”

Micron Technology’s announcement naming Mark Durcan, its No. 2 leader, as interim CEO after Steve Appleton’s death Friday did not surprise Micron watchers. Analysts say Durcan could provide a stable transition for the semiconductor company.

Though Durcan, the president and chief operating officer, announced one week before Appleton’s death that he would leave the company in August after 28 years, analysts think he may stay longer now.

Company officials say they were following corporate bylaws in naming Durcan interim CEO. But some analysts think it would be important for him to stay.

“My guess is he’s here another two years,” said Kevin Jones, a principal at Harmonic Investment Advisors in Boise. “He’s the hand on the wheel right now.”

Durcan’s nuts-and-bolts approach and engineering savvy complemented Appleton’s visionary leadership and competitive style, company watchers say.

“You could not ask for anyone better to step into the breach,” said Mike Howard, a former Micron employee and a semiconductor analyst in Boise for IHS iSuppli, a market research company.

But Micron’s board must decide whether Durcan is the best successor to Appleton — and the company wasn’t making Durcan or any other officials or board members available Friday to discuss whether he would stay if the board wants him.

Another possible permanent successor might by Mark W. Adams, Micron’s vice president of worldwide sales. A rising Micron star, Adams was tapped Jan. 27 to succeed Durcan as president and chief operating officer after Durcan’s retirement.

Adams was previously chief operating officer at Lexar Media Inc., which makes digital media products, until Micron bought Lexar in June 2006. Micron promoted him to the sales vice presidency in 2008.

Another question is what will happen to a possibility of Micron financial support or takeover of Elpida, a struggling Japanese competitor. Micron officials have refused to comment lately, but international press reports say Elpida has been talking with Micron.

Appleton would have been deeply involved in those talks, Howard said. “If it was going forward, it was going forward because of him,” Howard said.

Elpida remains an attractive opportunity for Micron as low chip prices squeeze the industry, Howard said. If the two companies joined forces, they would make Micron the No. 2 maker of dynamic random-access memory, the memory most commonly used in personal computers. Korea’s Samsung is No. 1. Elpida is second and Hynix, also of Korea, battles with Micron for third.

The questions of leadership and direction raised by Appleton’s death underscore the role Appleton played in defining the company where he started as a shift worker in 1983.

Joe Parkinson, a co-founder of Micron in the 1970s and later its CEO, hired Appleton to work at Micron in 1983. He saw a skilled tennis competitor and a bright guy, not a technogeek, in a business that would become an integral part of the country’s technology fabric.

Parkinson says he wasn’t looking for techies. “I looked for people as future managers,” he said.

Appleton started on the night shift in a Boise fabrication unit and quickly brought attention to himself as “the most competitive person you could imagine,” Parkinson said.

In the 1980s and 1990s, as Japanese technology threatened America’s chip industries, Appleton learned Japanese. “He’d be practicing his Japanese writing on plane trips,” Parkinson said.

Appleton succeeded Parkinson as CEO in 1994.

The company’s fortunes then and now have been tied to the volatile chip market, with business cycles of over- and under-supply that send prices — and profits — soaring and falling more dramatically than in most industries. Micron continued to grow, expanding overseas and creating partnerships with other companies to produce chips.

To reduce the swings, Appleton sought to diversify into other products, such as NAND flash memory, which retains information after power is shut off, and NOR, another type of flash memory that is often used to store executable code and is common in mobile devices. The diversification took root, and by 2011, NAND had overtaken DRAM as Micron’s principal product.

But the big swings persist. Amid 11 money-losing quarters from 2006 to 2009, Micron decided to end its manufacturing operations in Boise. Today the company employs fewer than half the number of workers in Boise that it had in the late 1990s. St. Luke’s Health System and Walmart now employ more people than Micron does.

But Micron has been adding to its payroll lately and building a new research building on its main campus in southeast Boise. Appleton’s death is unlikely to change that.

Throughout the good times and bad, Appleton was the primary decision maker at Micron, Howard said. If he said the company was going to do something, everyone fell in line.

“It was ruled by one guy,” he said.

Bill Roberts: 377-6408

With investment money from potato baron J.R. Simplot, Micron grew in the 1980s and 1990s into the largest private employer in Idaho. Its employee bonuses had a noticeable impact on the Treasure Valley economy. But those numbers have declined and Micron isn’t the economic elephant it once was.

Local employees:

1981: 50

1993: 5,000

1999: 12,000

2007: 9,000

2009: 5,200

2011: 6,000