Spin-In

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated Mon, 18 Mar 2002  7:11:32 PM Eastern Standard Time,
Bapopik at AOL.COM writes:

>    From Christopher Byron's financial column in the NEW YORK POST, 18 March 2002, pg. 35, col. 2:
>
>    The name for this sort of financial-world shell game is a "spin-in," and no one plays it with greater finesse than the crew at Cisco.
>
> (Byron examines how corporate directors form a private company, and how their company buys it from them, usually for a greatly inflated price.  The
corporate directors' company is not a "spin off," but a "spin in."  "Spin out," anyone?--ed.)
-----------------------------------------------
The article in question is available on-line at
http://www.nypost.com/seven/03182002/business/43784.htm
probably until March 25, at which time it will probably leave the Post's 7-day archive for more permanent, uh, quarters.

The quotation above is somewhat out of context, in that it seems to imply that the "spin-in" in question occurred at Cisco.  In fact, Byronwhere he says "The name...is a "spin-in" is referring back to the previous four paragraphs in which he discusses exclusively a questionable business deal at Rational Software Corp.  "...no one plays..." introduces a different business deal at Cisco.

Some other words or phrases of interest in this article:

"...bafflegab from the malarkey machine at Cisco Systems Inc."  I don't recall ever having seen "bafflegab" before.  New coining?  Also, there was and may still be a law firm in Washington DC with "Malarkey" in its title ("Malarkey Thomas and ...." or something like that).

"stupid accounting tricks"---"stupid .... tricks" is in my experience a phrase used only by computer people (I remember a collection of "stupid UNIX tricks" in the newspaper Computerworld several years back) but it could easily have arisen elsewhere.

"Cisco...was all torqued out of shape because we had shown..."---the usual version is "all bent out of shape".

"Torqued" implies that someone or something external to Cisco had applied a torque wrench to the company, which is not what Byron is saying.  Instead he is saying that Cisco is self-bent/torqued as a suspiciously out-of-proportion reaction to a previous column.

"peekaboo coyness"---how's that for a pleonasm (says me, who habitually refers to the "ADS-L list")

"top corporate underlings"---oxymoron?

"development-stage companies"---apparently a term from Cisco, not Byron

"set up like some kind of Defense Department skunk works in the apparent hope that no one would notice what was going on."  This is a misuse of "skunk works" which means not a secret operation but rather one in which a team is given a tough target, no supervision, and a mandate to do whatever is necessary.  The original (real) "Skonk Works" was the team at Lockheed that produced, among other things, the U-2 (the airplane, not the music group).  A skunk works is secret only if it is working on classified projects.

(The first "Skunk Works" was in the Li'l Abner comic strip, referring to what Merriam-Webster calls an "illicit distillery".  This Skunk Works was illicit but not secret).

"In Hebrew folk wisdom, a half-truth is said to be a whole lie"---I have not heard this one before.

     - Jim Landau
       Systems Engineer
       FAA Technical Center (ACT-350/BCI)
       Atlantic City Airport NJ 08405 USA