As most of you are well aware, the big news tonight is the confirmation that Steve Jobs really does have the rest of the Apple board eating out of his hand. That should come as no surprise to anyone, given that, since assuming the role of interim CEO last summer, he's managed to double the company's stock price and post a profit, all the while slowly and subtly reversing the trend of the media portraying Apple as a lame duck. So it would have been "unseemly" for the Apple board to hand Jobs an ultimatum in last Tuesday's board meeting-- take the job for good or move over and let someone else take the helm-- as had been suggested by some.

Instead, as board member Ed Woolard told the Dow Jones news service last Friday, no such ultimatum was posed, and no deadline was imposed by which Jobs must make a decision. The board is plainly happy to grab as much of Jobs as they can get, whether he be "interim" or not. "We hope he will stay a long time," says Woolard. There are more details in a ZDNet article.

Why do we get the feeling that Steve's just playing with us? A long, long time ago we at AtAT suggested a conspiracy theory that Steve's seemingly go-nowhere CEO hunt was a clever and intentional way to be CEO of Apple indefinitely (and permanently) without ever having to take the job publicly. Why would he want to do that? Because, as you may recall, back when Amelio was first ousted and the initial rumors of Steve becoming Apple CEO began to circulate, he flat-out told his employees at Pixar that he would not take the job, but instead remained committed to his post as CEO of Pixar. Well, given that he's clocked three months longer than he said he'd stay and hardly anyone's batted an eye, it seems like the plan's working. In fact, if he keeps on interim-ing for another three months or so, everyone will probably forget all about his declaration that he wouldn't take the job and he can leap in with both feet. After all, the public's memory is pretty short. We look forward to the day, personally.

On the other hand, we may not have to wait for the Jobs CEO announcement too long after all, if Reality's clues have any merit. Consider the following: next month's stockholder meeting, already delayed several times since February, has Jobs slated for the keynote address. He's also keynoting the Worldwide Developers Conference in May. Seeing as he's ensconced himself pretty solidly into two huge Apple events over the next two months, it's not unlikely that Reality's source is quite right when he/she states that Jobs accepting the permanent position is a "done deal."

If this scenario turns out to be true, our personal AtAT prediction is that Steve will announce his formal acceptance of the post at the stockholders' meeting. That would guarantee a standing ovation, a huge media blitz, and most likely a significant spike in Apple's stock price-- and recall that the package that the board is rumored to have offered Jobs includes something like 5% of the whole company in stock. Remember, too, that Steve's got no particular problem with selling that stock if he feels like it (he's only got one share now, fer cryin' out Pete's sake). That could be one lucrative announcement for Steve, both financially and egotistically.

The other interpretation is just that Jobs plans to remain in the "interim" slot for many more months to come, with no plans to make things official. Either way we'd be glad to have him stick around-- he makes things fun. And we certainly hope he'll at least stay on long enough to deliver the keynote address at MacWorld New York this July, an event that AtAT will be attending come hell or high water.

Man, it's not like it was hard to get excited about the Mac OS before, but these days, the future is positively thrilling. Sure, the first customer release of Rhapsody's coming out this July, according to Mac OS Rumors (probably to be unveiled at MacWorld Expo New York?), but Allegro's due in the same time frame, which will bring a slew of cool features to the "average Mac user's" desktop, such as better performance, awesome Appearance themes, and improved memory protection. For most of the Mac-using world, Allegro will have a more immediate impact that Rhapsody will this summer.

Then, next January, things get seriously cool with Sonata, a Mac OS that's so much more architecturally advanced than Mac OS 8.1, you can basically think of it as "Rhapsody for users instead of servers." While Allegro is rumored to include some early form of the Yellow Box runtime libraries (which will let Allegro users run applications coded for Rhapsody), Sonata is the Yellow Box, hosted on the Mach kernel, and including a "transparent" Blue Box to allow people to run today's Mac OS applications flawlessly.

So for all of you who (like us) were concerned about Apple's de-emphasis of Rhapsody as a user OS and their re-emphasis on the Mac OS as the primary operating system of Apple for years to come, there's quite a lot to look forward to. Indeed, given the description of Sonata, it sounds like we're all going to be running Rhapsody after all-- it'll just be called the Mac OS. Shrewd marketing at work?