By now we're all pretty used to reports of shrinking market share, right? It is, after all, just part of being a Mac user in the late 90's. The most recent numbers, however are a mite troubling; they indicate that Apple's piece of the education pie, traditionally a stronghold and one of their two "core markets," is dwindling at what can only be described as an alarming rate. A Bloomberg News article breaks the bad news.

Apparently Apple had 61% of the educational market in 1993, but by 1996 that had fallen to about 41%. That's still not bad, but last year it plummetted to 26.8%. Chalk it up to the swirling uncertainty about Apple's future that stemmed from its huge losses over the last couple of years, as well as the gap in pricing between Macs and comparable Wintel systems (if indeed a Wintel system is ever truly comparable to a Mac). Remember a few years ago when a Wintel system was unequivocally much cheaper than a Mac? Unfortunately, while Apple's made fantastic strides in making its midrange systems even less expensive than many brand-name Wintels, at the low end it's just the same old story. And we're willing to bet that most educational purchasers have one paramount directive: Buy as many systems as possible with this amount of money. (Note that repair, upkeep, and training costs are often ignored when this decision is made, regardless of how shortsighted that may be.)

Hindsight is 20/20 vision, of course, but we at AtAT are starting to think that Apple should have "retreated" to targeting its core markets of education and content creation a little earlier. To see that they lost a fifth of the educational market share from 1993 to 1996 implies that they just weren't paying attention. And reversing the trend in the schools now will be an uphill battle, especially with Intel and Microsoft teaming up to give colleges "migration grants" of millions of dollars in NT systems (remember the Yale scandal?) and Wintel manufacturers like Dell and Compaq aggressively selling cheap machines that Apple simply still can't match in price. Here's hoping that the upcoming Mac NC's and the low-cost G3-based Artemis will provide suitable ammunition to continue the fight.

And yet, despite the incredible shrinking market share numbers, Apple's stock has been on the rise this past week. It's actually been rising slowly but steadily since the beginning of the month, when it hovered at around 17 1/2, and has been bobbing above 20 in the last week, which is reportedly a "critical psychological barrier." CNET has more on Apple's recent Wall Street activity.

Several factors are being attributed to the recent rise. One of the most important is probably the recent statements made by a Heidrick & Struggles exec that Apple would name a new CEO in 30 to 45 days; after all, it's not hard to see why Wall Street would have qualms about getting behind a company with only a "temporary CEO" keeping things running, no matter how much cool stuff that temporary entity can do. Other hints that big news is coming include "subtle changes in the company's channel" and lowered prices on older products like the 6500 line. Those facts, coupled with the continuing strong sales of G3 systems, are leading some people to think that Apple just may post a profit this quarter after all. (We at AtAT are not holding our collective breath, however.)

Of course, we at AtAT think the recent spike is due at least in part to the rumors of severe turmoil in Apple's boardroom, which is implying a possible ousting of Steve Jobs to make room for rumored CEO frontrunner Jim Cannavino of IBM. Let's see what next week brings...

We've been getting a lot of feedback about our recent InfiniteOS coverage. Many of you have thanked us for posting the warnings about potential disk corruption before you yourselves got around to trying the software. Others, however, are accusing us of deliberately trying to sink the project for unspecified reasons. While we're often the recipient of various and sundry accusations, this one in particular bothers us.

To set the record straight, we have no intention of squelching development of alternative OSes for the Mac hardware platform. Heck, we run the BeOS ourselves on occasion, and we love it. Our first mention of the InfiniteOS contained no hint of negativity, unless you consider our own paranoia about running strange software a negative relection on Cache Computing. But after it was brought to our attention that Cache Computing developer Kevin Avila had reportedly run OS hoaxes in the past, we had to tell you. And when viewer Joseph McConnell's disk-wrecking experience with the download was brought to our attention, we felt compelled to warn people about the potential danger involved in trying the software. After all, if our viewers' systems go down, how are they going to tune in to AtAT? Horror of horrors!

So, for now, this is probably our last coverage of the InfiniteOS. The summary: Based on the authors' past activity, it may be a hoax; it also may be real. Based on four viewers' feedback, it may potentially cause disk corruption; it also may not. It's worth noting, however, that at the time of this writing, the link to Cache Computing's InfiniteOS download page is returning a "File Not Found" error. And in fact, the main Cache Computing web site is simply showing an empty directory index. A temporary glitch? Or a hoax that pulled its own plug? Or, perhaps, the InfiniteOS team retreating from the public eye, with plans to re-emerge once their project is in a more palatable state to prove the naysayers wrong once and for all? We can only hope...