Maybe it's just us, but we're starting to suspect that whenever Steve Jobs "rallies the troops" for a company-wide meeting, it's less about disseminating information to the staff than it is about leaking additional spin control to the press. After all, he can't possibly think that all of Apple's 7000-odd employees would keep their lips zipped, right? There's always going to be that inevitable blabbermouth (bless his or her gabby soul!) who can't wait to run off and spill the scoop to ZDNet-- and, of course, as faithful viewer Johnny first noted, that's just what happened after yesterday's "confidential" all-hands bull session. So let's take a look at the salient points that Steve wanted us all to learn, shall we? It's the least we can do, after he went to all that trouble.

Probably the most noteworthy bit from our perspective was Steve's reiteration of Apple's intent to return to profitability this quarter. We know, we know-- Fred Anderson said as much during the earnings conference call a week ago, but that was, well, a week ago. Since then we've all noticed the Incredible Lengthening Delivery Times reported at the Apple Store on most of the company's kickin' new gear, such as the PowerBook G4 and the SuperDrive-enabled 733 MHz Power Mac G4; to us, at least, the apparent trouble that Apple is having fulfilling demand for new toys foretells the distinct possibility that the "small profit" promised in April may have already tumbled into oblivion. So to hear even third-hand that Steve is still expecting a profit based on orders for the new Macs is encouraging.

Indeed, Apple's unchanged profit prediction isn't the only mildly surprising news that the status quo is still, uh, status quo-ing. We're assuming that the reason those product delays haven't altered Steve's profit expectations is because, at least according to him, there aren't any product delays; the titanium PowerBook will indeed "begin shipping next week." If the first PowerBook G4 leaves the dock before Thursday, Apple will have officially met Steve's controversial keynote "end of the month" ship date-- and the high-end Power Macs are reportedly "on track" to ship by the end of February, just as he originally promised. Sure, the company may only ship one of each model, but hey, the important thing is that they ship; no one's making a liar out of Steve!

Originally we figured that the comedy of errors known publicly as the Microsoft web site outage was a simple movie of the week, but no-- evidently it's a multi-part miniseries instead. Yesterday we told you how Microsoft copped to the fact that a "staff error" brought the family of Microsoft web sites to its virtual knees for nearly a full twenty-four-hour period, which must have been incredibly embarrassing for the company that most less-educated mortals probably consider to be the Supreme Ruler of the high-tech universe. Microsoft was quick to assert that the problem was due entirely to human error, and not to any malfunction of the company's own products or software-- and it most definitely wasn't the result of any sort of outside attack.

Not long after that episode hit the airwaves, however, faithful viewer Mike Dini wrote in to tell us that "at 11:11 AM PST, the microsoft.com site is still down. Also the MSNBC.com site is still down." Needless to say, since Microsoft had reportedly fixed its little "issue" the previous evening, we regarded Mike's report as passing strange-- but lo and behold, he was mostly correct: Microsoft's site wasn't still down; it was down again. And this time around, the company couldn't lay the blame on some poor flunky who made a particularly unfortunate typo. Yes, according to an InfoWorld article, yesterday's unplanned downtime was due to an Internet vandal's "denial of service attack" that was unrelated to the "internal technical problem" that nuked Microsoft's sites Tuesday and Wednesday.

Interestingly enough, for whatever reason, several people had already considered Microsoft's claim that a DNS error has caused the first outage to be somewhat less than credible. Some of these individuals suspected that the original blackout had in fact been caused by the very type of denial-of-service attack that Microsoft admitted was behind the second outage. You do realize what this means, don't you? Our original insistence that Steve Jobs was blameless in Microsoft's web woes may well have been seriously incorrect. Not that we're accusing him, or anything, but a little investigation never hurt anybody. Meanwhile, it's Friday and Microsoft's site is functioning normally... but it's early yet, so we're considering starting a pool on what excuse Microsoft provides if and when its site takes a header later tonight. Dibs on "direct lightning strike"!

You know how Apple's been setting the stage for the next great computing revolution to rival the impact of desktop publishing? The first step was iMovie, that marvelous application that turns a digital camcorder and a FireWire-equipped Mac into an inexpensive, easy, and fun video-editing studio. And iMovie was just the beginning; to make the "desktop video" revolution stick, Apple is following through with the SuperDrive and iDVD, so that people can throw their finished iMovies onto a professional-looking DVD that'll work in any consumer player. It'll take a while for the cost of the equipment to drop and the technology to filter down into the mainstream, but hey, when iMovie first came out, digital camcorders were pretty scarce among average consumers, but these days they're cheaper and more available than ever.

So there it is: desktop video, the Next Big Thing™ according to Apple. Will the Macintosh lead millions of "regular people" to write and produce their own movies, just as the advent of the LaserWriter launched a zillion homebrew magazines, newsletters, and poorly-designed garage sale flyers? We'll find out in a few years, but in the meantime, Katie (AtAT's resident fact-checker and Goddess of Minutiae) stumbled upon a good sign in a recent Sun Times column by Roger Ebert. It seems that Richard Linklater (that guy who did Slacker) made a big splash at the last Sundance Film Festival with his latest project, Waking Life.

Waking Life was "originally shot on digital video" and then the footage was transformed into animation via the use of custom software running on-- you guessed it-- standard Macs instead of "expensive workstations." The buzz about this film is very solid, and if it gets as much good press as Ebert seems to think it will, Waking Life may be the latest success that inspires legions of aspiring filmmakers to grab a camera and a Mac and go to town. Sure, The Blair Witch Project may have been a more visible call to arms, but we think Linklater's flick just might show people that they can make a movie with digital video and a Mac without it needing to look like unedited camcorder footage. Now excuse us, but we have a script rewrite to get through-- we're losing the light, people!