Think of it this way-- at least red's a festive holiday color. Yup, Apple's 10-K filing with the SEC last Friday predicted poor sales and revenue through at least March, implying that the red river of loss will rage on through Q2 of 1998. So much for the profitable fourth quarter of '97; given Apple's predictions, a news.com article says that actual performance in the first half could be "dismal." Why such poor performance? Apple blames it in part on the fire sale closeout prices of the very clones it killed. More cake? No thanks, I had a big fat helping of poetic justice for lunch...

Not that we don't agree that the clone market was hurting more than it helped, but still... there's something perversely satisfying about this turn of events. Don't get us wrong-- we'd much prefer a profitable Apple; but if they didn't expect fire sale clones to kick them in the proverbial knees in the short run, their forecasters are even worse than legend holds.

The clones aren't the only factor, however. Apple's own direct sales effort is still locked in a price war with its own dealers, some of whom recently decided to decline co-op funds in order to sell Macs below the Apple minimum advertised price. Club Mac, for instance, had its best month ever, by selling systems at over $100 less than the Apple price. Apple's weapon in the price war was a free Quicktake 200 digital camera-- although faithful viewer Eric Yang notes that the promotion is no longer available from the Apple Store. Is that a good sign or a bad one?

Despite the negative report, it's not the end of the world. 10-K reports always look on the dark side of life, and things may not be as bad as the picture Apple painted. Sales in the dealer channel, at least, climbed to 5.4%, up from 2.8% in July. That's something to cling to...

Despite troublesome side-effects of his pain medication, Mac OS Rumors' Ryan Meader refuses to disappoint. Rumors of an Apple/Oracle alliance are still struggling tiredly down the pike. At this point, we've heard this too often not to consider it true. Apple's NC will use the Mac OS as its interface, while it'll be connected to a Rhapsody server running Oracle's proven NC server software. This one-two punch was originally intended to take the educational market by storm, though one hopes that Apple will push them seriously in the corporate arena as well.

The alliance's unveiling, originally intended for the November 10th Steve Jobs ÜberAnnouncement, was postponed at the last minute for unknown reasons. However, the latest rumors are that the wraps will be taken off the plans at the MacWorld Expo, less than a month away. Between that and a possible new CEO, Steve's keynote is shaping up to be even more entertaining than his last media circus.

We sympathize with Ryan's recovery from wisdom tooth extraction (the experience sucked for us, too), and hope he feels better soon, and gets to watch some daytime TV in the meantime.

Being collectors of Mac sightings in "unlikely scenarios," we're beholden to faithful viewer Matt Garland, who noticed that Microsoft's recent web page touting their new BackOffice Server 4.0, included a very distinct Mac mouse in the accompanying graphic. (Microsoft's pages are browser-dependent. For those of us not running IE 4.0, Matt has kindly reproduced the graphic here.)

Needless to say, Backoffice doesn't exist for the Mac; it's a Windows NT server suite. But this isn't the first time we've seen evidence of Macs among Microsoft's web graphics designers... Remember all those animated GIFs that were stamped as being made with GIFBuilder? That's a Mac-only product.

If you happen to spot any similar evidence of subversive Mac infiltration into unlikely places, please drop us a line. Yes, we realize that it implies nothing more than the Mac's presence in the content creation/graphics realm, but we still get a kick out of such things. ;-)