Okay, welcome to our rambling and disjointed look at the past three months. Steve asked for ninety days, and those ninety days are over. So what's different about Apple this Christmas? The landscape sure looks a lot different in certain ways, though in others it's business as usual.

Steve announced that Apple would focus its technical and marketing efforts on what he identified as Apple's two key markets: education and content creation. This narrowing of focus is a double-edged sword. On the plus side, this enables Apple to try to hold onto these last two bastions of Macdom. But on the minus side, many think it signals a surrender by Apple on the home front. Macs have never sold terrifically well into the home market, primarily because Apple has never shipped a Mac at a low enough price point. Steve himself has said that Apple has "lost" the consumer-market war, which fact many Apple-watchers deny, pointing to the swelling number of households buying their first computer-- it's not over yet, so should Apple be giving up on a market in which the Mac, with its ease of use and true Plug-and-Play, should excel?

Nevertheless, we should examine what's been done to retain these core markets. Let's look at education first. What's been done? As of right now, not much. There's rumors-a-plenty about Apple's NC project, which was originally intended to target schools who could buy these sub-$1000 Mac NC's and connect them all to Rhapsody servers. But that project won't be announced until probably March, and Apple is rumored to be retargeting its NC's at businesses, realizing that education is typically not very willing to embrace brand-new technologies. And what about all these colleges accepting Intel "migration grants" to dump their Macs in favor of NT machines? On the K-12 end, Microsoft's heavily campaigning to stick Windows 95 machines in the schools to replace all the Macs. We haven't seen Steve address either of these situations at all. In fact, Steve's only education-related initiatives seem to involve giving software to universities at low or no cost-- but Mac hardware is still more expensive in the short term, and unfortunately people rarely consider the long-term costs of owning a computer.

How about content creation? Well, you still can't buy a Mac tuned for or bundled with Photoshop, although we hear Apple's working on that. Inviting the heads of Adobe and Macromedia within the Apple walls to bring them up to date on future directions is a good sign. The G3's are awesome from a raw chip performance standpoint, but upgrade cards from Newer Technologies and other companies offer even better performance. And more and more, Windows NT is looking like a reasonably viable alternative to the Mac OS in graphics environments. Arguably, shipping Rhapsody DR and keeping Rhapsody (reasonably) on schedule is Apple's best hope against the NT juggernaut in the content creation market.

So no real progress on keeping Macs in these "core markets." What else has Steve done? Well, there's been a change in the way that Macs are sold. Most strikingly, you can now buy a Mac direct from Apple, built to order, by visiting the online Apple Store. Early reports indicate that the Apple Store is pretty successful (third-best online store on the net), though, of course, it doesn't come close to Dell's success. Still, for a store that's only been running for six weeks, that's a pretty good start. As for the resellers, Steve cut a bunch of distributors out of the picture, and also reduced co-op funds, which prompted a number of resellers to enter a price war, forgoing co-op funds by selling Macs for less than Apple's minimum advertised price. The full effect of this development has yet to be seen, but it's making things interesting...

What about advertising? There's been a solid improvement in that area, though there's still a lot of room for improvement. The "Think Different" campaign has certainly provoked a lot of attention; people seem either to love it or hate it, but almost everybody recognizes it. A USA Today panel voted it one of the year's best commercials, while, we believe, Entertainment Weekly voted it one of the worst. And several parodies of the commercial have infiltrated network Tv, which only increases the campaign's exposure. The campaign's most vocal detractors have two valid concerns: firstly, the ads still fall squarely in the "touchy-feely" category-- there are no product ads, the word "Macintosh" never appears, even the company logo is understated. Secondly, many people question the taste of using Gandhi and John Lennon to hawk computers. But everyone should agree that "Think Different" put Apple back on the radar screen of public perception. We hope that the second round of ads will include some solid product ads and comparisons with Wintel systems.

Perhaps the biggest difference between the Apple landscape now and three months ago is the change in the cloning situation. Steve basically eliminated the clones by buying out Power Computing and frustrating Motorola into giving up. UMAX is still selling Mac clones, but rumors abound that even UMAX won't renew its Mac OS license when it expires this spring. PowerTools and MacTell are still selling Mac clones, but there's no question that the Age of Cloning is over.

We hate to be crass (especially this holiday season) but let's talk about the bottom line: Apple's stock price is hovering near its ten-year low, and Apple isn't expected to return to profitability for at least another six months or so. And if that's ostensibly why Gil Amelio got booted, then we've got to say Steve hasn't done any better. How much more red ink can Apple bleed before it runs dry?

One of the bigger stains on his first ninety days is Steve's inability to find a CEO, and his unwillingness to take the job himself. By insisting on remaining on the board of directors to "guide" the permanent CEO, he has all but scared off every promising candidate Apple's considered. But we're more and more convinced that there are now only two options that remain: First, Steve could step down and allow a new CEO the amount of control he/she needs to bring Apple back to profitability. While it'd be a shame to see Steve go (if for no reason other than it kills the story-book ending), it's looking like the only option unless the second scenario comes to pass: Steve would have to take the position himself, and he's said again and again that he's not interested. But after three months with no CEO results, we think it's just about time to put up or shut up...

So what are our conclusions? Basically, we conclude that despite the sizeable volume of change we've seen since Steve officially took the reins, ninety days is just too soon to tell. Steve's got some, er, "interesting" ideas about what directions in which Apple must move in order to thrive, but Apple's a big ship-- it'll be another few months before we see if his directions can steer Apple away from the big freakin' iceberg looming on the horizon. Let's see what he has to say at the upcoming Expo, and wing it from there.