Recently Larry Ellison hasn't just been Oracle's CEO and a member of the Apple board; he's also been the unofficial barometer for the public when it comes to the Apple CEO search. The recent word, however, is that nothing's really changed.

A Bloomberg News article shows Larry confirming that Apple has a "favorite candidate" for the CEO slot, but he admits that no offer has yet been made. "There's absolutely no decision yet," he says. It's beginning to look unlikely that a CEO slot will be filled by Christmas, although last year's sudden announcement of the NeXT buyout in late December may have set a precedent for important Apple stuff going down just before Santa warms up the reindeer.

We at AtAT also find it noteworthy that when asked about whether Oracle would make an investment in Apple, Larry just flat out said "No." Given all the signs (including Oracle supposedly having announced an Apple investment to key employees!), we are now pretty convinced that the big announcement last November 10th was indeed supposed to include news of an Apple/Oracle deal, which fell through in the eleventh hour, thus leaving Steve with only an hour's worth of material, instead of the scheduled two and a half.

Ooooo, this is getting good. Microsoft's defense against the Department of Justice's antitrust charges is that Internet Explorer is not a separate product, but rather an integrated component of Windows 95, and has always been conceived as such, even before Netscape existed. No problem. Except that an Associated Press article reports that the DoJ now has a "smoking gun."

If MSIE has been planned as an OS component and not as a self-standing product as far back as 1993, perhaps Microsoft would like to explain the email message from MS exec Jim Allchin, written just last year, in which he worried about how MSIE was "going to win" greater market share in the light of Netscape Navigator's popularity. In this missive, Jim suggests using the market share of Windows to bolster the market share of MSIE: "My conclusion is that we must leverage Windows more. Treating IE as just an add-on to Windows which is cross-platform (is) losing our biggest advantage-- Windows market share."

Who's thirsty for a big, frosty glass of revisionism?

Has anyone ever said that Apple doesn't have style? Come on, how many other "beleaguered" and "troubled" companies are going to announce that they'll donate a portion of the proceeds from one of their most popular sellers to charity?

That's right, you can read about it at MacAddict. Not content with merely bleeding off a couple of billion dollars of red ink in the past couple of years, Apple's donning the Santa hat and giving $10 to charity for each and every copy of Mac OS 8 that it sells until January 15th. The lucky recipients are the Humane Society of the United States, the Second Harvest Food Bank, and the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and the best part is, the buyer gets to decide. See, if you go out and buy a copy of Mac OS 8, the $10 donation is made in your name-- and to the charity of your choice. Neat, huh?

Now, before some of you get all huffy and indignant about Apple giving away cash to those darn animals and dying children when it should be saving its money to get back in the black (geez, remember when most Mac users were bleeding-heart liberals?), calm down and do the math: the total donation only comes out to a few million bucks. That's not much to a company the size of Apple (heck, they lost fifty times that last quarter!), but it's a heckuvalot to the charities receiving the cash. So Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night...