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Orange man talks crap

Not Paisley, but Snook

Hans Snook, boss of mobile phone outfit Orange, literally spills his guts in an extraordinary interview in UK broadsheet the Sunday Telegraph. The new, lightweight Snook extols the virtues of colonic irrigation, claiming that the simple expedient of having five gallons of purified water, mixed with vinegar and caffeine [sounds like the office coffee machine - Ed] pumped up one's bottom can dislodge up to 40 pounds of... er... crap. Snook had just returned from a two-week fasting holiday in Thailand, where he had his enlightening - or at the very least lightening - experience. "You massage your stomach, feel it gulping around inside you and when you can't hold it in anymore, you just let it out." Er, thanks for sharing that with us, Hans. Commenting on Orange's two takeovers in the last six months - the first by Mannesmann and the second by Vodafone when it snapped up the German company - Snook is obviously enjoying the irony of Orange now being owned by its largest UK mobile phone rival. "Vodafone has to support us financially," he says gleefully. "So we've been plotting, thinking about what we could buy that would cost billions of pounds." Dewy-eyed Dr Spinola adds: ICL, once the great white hope of the UK's computer industry, is now a mere shadow of its former self. A company once rightly lauded for technical innovation - sadly linked with rather less successful marketing - in the 70s and 80s, it has suffered the ignominy of takeovers by STC and Fujitsu and still carries the taint of being bailed out by government loan guarantees. But if we look at the people running some of the world's top companies, we will find a common denominator: BT's Sir Peter Bonfield, Vodafone's Chris Gent and Orange's Hans Snook all worked together at ICL in the mid-80s, before being lured away to the wonderful world of telecomms. The tantalising question raised here is what would have happened had these three extremely able (and personable) persons stuck in at ICL? ®

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