Worker Bees of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your stock options! And since most of those options are just about worthless following Apple's stock price debacle a few weeks back, we aren't too surprised to see more of those industrious little hive-dwelling insects decide to tempt fate and the Wrath of Steve by leaking various proprietary dollops of honey-sweet insider goodness to the Big Evil sometimes referred to as the "Mac Web." Indeed, the number of seemingly legit unsolicited reports showing up in our own mailbox describing what's going on inside the hive has definitely been increasing lately. Most of that stuff we won't even hint at, since the last thing we want to do is get anyone in trouble, but a fair chunk of it has already surfaced elsewhere, so we don't see much harm in telling you what some other people have posted.

Regular viewers will recall that Uncle Steve already amassed the workers a couple of weeks back for damage control following that scary-looking earnings warning. Well, according to rough but reasonably copious notes publicly available over at Go2Mac, Round 2 of the mass placation occurred last Friday, as Steve assembled the troops once again to put his unique brand of spin on the quarterly results reported last Wednesday. While apparently a fair percentage of the verbiage was "We Shall Prevail" pep-talk kind of stuff, there were definitely a few interesting points raised, both during Steve's main spiel and during the obligatory Q&A session that followed. Amid the noteworthy-yet-pedestrian stuff about Oracle running on Mac OS X, Apple tackling the scientific and server markets, and how the company won't let the education market "slip away," there were two nuggets in particular that piqued our interest.

First of all, Apple employees are being given more stock options; in fact, any employees without options are being given a minimum of 100 shares so that "every employee will be an owner of the company." (Because we all know how well that sort of thing worked for United Airlines.) Well, we happen to think it's a sweet gesture-- albeit sort of a cheap one, given the circumstances. In fact, if they had been meaning to do this for a while, now was definitely the time, since AAPL isn't likely to sink much lower. Food for thought for the conspiracy theorists with a "stock manipulation" bent: between Apple having another three hundred grand earmarked for a buyback of its own stock, and this new initiative to spread stock around the company like so much Monopoly money, what are the odds that the earnings "speed bump" was all just a cunning plan to make shares of AAPL more affordable to the company itself? (Partial credit will be given, so remember to show your work.)

The other juicy little tidbit involves Steve's expectations of his thousands of minions. Reportedly "he asked all the employees to work harder, even though it is coming up on the holidays." But don't get the wrong idea; he's not setting his staff to work and then slacking off for a cup of vegan egg nog. The actual quote is supposedly "I hope to see you late at night in the hallways with me." Well, Fa La La to you too, Santa Steve. Sounds like a lot of Infinite Loop denizens are going to be hoping for No-Doz under the tree this year.

Quick, why is Apple's stock price in the toilet right now? Earnings warning? Sales slump? Cubes too pricey? Bzzzzzzzzzt, sorry, thanks for playing. No, for the real reason that AAPL is currently still struggling to stay above the $20 level (when is was in the 50s mere weeks ago) is because Alan Deutschman had to open his big fat yap-- er, lift his big fat pen-- and write that unauthorized biography of everyone's favorite mercurial iCEO. At least, that's what John Dvorak thinks.

Granted, this is also the die-hard Wintel champion who thought that iMacs would never sell and then also predicted the dismal flop of the iBook because it was "too girly." Sure, he's been making a few positive Apple rumblings of late, but by most Mac fans' standards, Dvorak is still strictly a beige thinker. In a way, though, his present assertion that Apple's troubles on Wall Street are due more to The Second Coming of Steve Jobs than to any serious problem with Apple itself might actually be seen as a compliment to the company-- if not to said company's fearless leader.

Make no mistake; whereas Steve himself called the book a "hatchet job," Dvorak calls it "devastating" and chock full of just the sort of "creepy material" that would "spook the most hardcore investor." Check it out; in Dvorak's estimation, the book portrays Apple's iCEO as a "cussing, abusive lout" who's prone to "erratic, antisocial behavior." (Yeah, but he's soooo cute!) Worse yet, he isn't even an honest monster; according to Deutschman, Steve actually faked a product demo during his days at NeXT by playing a movie off a laserdisc and claiming it was video being played from a computer instead. Indeed, Dvorak claims that Deutschman's work "rips a hole in Jobs that can only be compared to the fatal tear in the Hindenburg." (Hang on-- is Dvorak deliberately comparing Uncle Steve to a big, flaming gasbag? If so, he's not exactly one to talk.)

So, those of you who took a bath on AAPL when its price got cut in half overnight-- don't take out your frustrations on Steve, or the boneheaded Apple managers who led the company into a sales slump, or even the media at large. Instead, you should be focusing your ire like a laser on Alan Deutschman, at least as far as John Dvorak is concerned. Heck, we know we can always use another scapegoat to pad the ol' enemies list. Boil him in oil!

You know how Microsoft fought tooth and nail to keep its "Redmond Justice" appeal out of the hands of the Supreme Court, instead shooting for an Appeals Court hearing first? Well, for those of you who haven't been keeping up, there are two obvious reasons why. The first is that this case has been dragging on seemingly forever already, and Microsoft's hoping to stretch it out even longer to render any eventual penalty completely irrelevant. The second is that the Appeals Court has been very good to Microsoft in the past, siding with the Redmond Giant on more than one antitrust-related occasion. Microsoft got its wish; the Supreme Court kicked the case back down to a lower court, much to the Justice Department's chagrin-- but faithful viewer Porsupah hints that the Appeals Court may not be quite so friendly an audience after all.

According to The Register, Microsoft may not be able to scare up much sympathy from the judges it faces next-- at least, not from Judge Ginsburg. Reportedly, while overseeing another case, he and his three clerks "all used Apple PowerBooks on a network that allowed them to send messages back and forth while the arguments went on." Macs in the courtroom; does justice get any sweeter? Whether or not Judge Ginsburg's "platform of choice" has any bearing on his leanings in the "Redmond Justice" case remains to be seen... but this could get very interesting.

Incidentally, we figure that's why Microsoft has actually been trying to develop decent Mac products for the past couple of years. The company knew full well that eventually its case (and therefore its fate) would rest in the hands of at least one or two PowerBook-using appellate judges, and thus hoped to curry their favor with such allegedly Mactastic applications as Internet Explorer 5 and office:mac 2001. A more diabolical plan we've never encountered. Here's hoping that at least some of those judges still haven't forgiven Microsoft for inflicting serious psychic carnage on the Mac-using world with Word 6.0.