The fur flying over Intuit's recent decision to axe Quicken development on the Mac side may soon subside. Steve Jobs announced on Wednesday that he and Intuit CEO (and Apple board member) Bill Campbell had "discussed" Intuit's decision, and a joint announcement about the resolution is slated for next week. In the meantime, a Mac OS Rumors source has an interesting perspective on the possible solution.

Intuit may essentially have blackmailed Apple into agreeing to a bundling arrangement, wherein every Mac shipped will include Quicken preloaded on the hard drive. Apple knows that Quicken is a required application for any platform that ever hopes to compete in the home computer market. And Intuit knows that Apple knows that. Since Intuit wasn't too happy with its Mac Quicken upgrade sales of late, it put the screws on Apple by threatening to cancel the whole thing. The solution? Intuit agrees to continue Quicken on the Mac, if Apple agrees to pay to preinstall Quicken on every Mac it ships.

If true, it's kind of sleazy that Intuit forced Apple's hand this way, but that's business. We hear that Quicken is an essential enough application to the consumer market that it is crucial for Apple to keep it growing on the Mac platform; in fact, the bundling agreement might even help consumer sales of Macs, since Apple and resellers will be able to advertise Quicken on every Mac. Besides, as Rumors mentions, the potential reversal of policy may also be entirely due to Apple finally clueing Intuit into its future plans to push heavily into the consumer space. We'll presumably all know more when the actual announcement is made next week.

The media coverage of Gil Amelio's tragic year and a half at Apple continues, fueled by his recent steamy tell-all On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple. A Washington Post article reveals Amelio's feeling that he and Apple were a "mismatch," which we at AtAT would classify as probably the biggest understatement of the year.

Amelio, who once had the chutzpah to demand a $27 million compensation package for taking the CEO spot, is now pictured as somewhat humbled by his experience at Apple. And despite the fact that he wasn't the right man (or even the right kind of man) to be running Apple, we do have to credit him with bringing back Steve Jobs-- even though that certainly wasn't necessarily his intention. And he also claims that at the height of the "let's sell Apple" mania sweeping through the corporate halls, he was the lone voice crying for Apple to remain independent.

Here's the thing-- is the media unwittingly setting up Amelio as Apple's next savior? Think about it; sure, he never founded the company, but he was definitely ousted after losing a high-level power struggle, much like Jobs was. What if, several years down the line, Steve Jobs is running Apple into the ground, and the board hires turnaround artist Gil as a special advisor? Would he sign on, eager to prove himself to a public who had witnessed his highly-publicized first failure? The article reveals that he "would run the company again, if he had a chance." Too scary to consider, unless you're a horror film buff with a strong stomach, or maybe a fan of the old "What If?" issues of Marvel Comics.

Hmmm, this might be the way that Apple's going to get back solidly in the public vision-- according to MacCentral, the "Man on Fire" segment a couple of nights ago was sponsored by "Elite Computer" of Cupertino, who are Apple Computer specialists. That's a nice little publicity surge for Apple. (Does anyone else think it's strange that so much of Apple's publicity comes from its customers? I mean, we've all been sitting around thinking of possible commercials to make for them. That may speak volumes about Apple's customer loyalty, but it also reveals that Apple should probably be advertising a lot more than they are.)

In addition, Mac OS Rumors reports that Steve Jobs may make an appearance on Dave's show, when he's in New York for this summer's MacWorld Expo. That would be a particular coup, we think, though we somewhat doubt that Jobs would actually consent to be a guest on Dave's show. If it does happen, there's every chance that the whole thing could blow up in Apple's face, but the free publicity would almost certainly be worth the risk.

Of course, we've got to admit that although the AtAT staff were big fans of Dave's show on NBC, we haven't even hardly ever seen it since his move to CBS. (Nothing against Dave or CBS, but frankly it just never really interested us to see him after the move.) You can bet we'll be tuning in for the Jobs appearance, if it happens, though. Actually, what we'd really like to see is Steve in the Velcro Suit...