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Cue The Vultures (6/13/99)
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Woo-hoo! And here we were thinking that Apple's newfound financial health-- signs of year-over-year revenue growth, increased cash reserves, record-breaking inventory numbers, stock price hovering not too far from a five-year high, etc.-- was a double-edged sword as far as AtAT was concerned. See, while an Apple that isn't spurting arterial red ink all over the balance sheets means that our Platform of Choice™ may grow and thrive rather than dying an ugly and sordid thrashing death, and that is, of course, a good thing. But it also means that lots of the juicy angst-ridden rumors that always get spread when the vultures are hovering started to dry up, and that kind of content is AtAT's bread and all-vegetable-based margarine, if you catch our collective drift. After all, without Apple buyout rumors, life just feels a tad... emptier.
So how cool is it that, despite Apple's fairy tale resurgence, rumors of a buyout are once again resurfacing? To AtAT's writers, we're talking manna from heaven. It seems that longtime Mac pundit Don Crabb is behind this latest development; faithful viewer Jerry O'Neil pointed out a Crabb rumor/opinion piece that, inexplicably, seems to have gotten picked up by Yahoo News. Crabb has been quite vocal in the past about his frustration that the new Jobsian Apple seems unwilling to sell into enterprise environments, choosing instead the "niche" of consumer and educational sales. That might color his opinion that Jobs has simply been saving Apple only to sell it off.
To us, it just doesn't ring true. Uncle Steve, if anything, has been saving Apple primarily to thumb his nose at the tech world that saw him ousted from his own company back in the '80s. (There's also the little matter of what appears to be his genuine affection for the company he cofounded in a garage twenty-something years ago, but bile and vengeance are higher ratings-getters than romance any day of the week.) Remember, Jobs admits that he once turned his company over to "bozos" and he vowed that he would never make that mistake again. Personally, we believe him-- otherwise he wouldn't still be sticking around as iCEO. But hey, who can really fathom the motives of the mercurial Mr. Jobs?
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SceneLink (1598)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 6/13/99 episode: June 13, 1999: Apple buyout rumors are back and ready to rock. Meanwhile, Sears actually seems serious about selling iMacs, and JCPenney leaps on the bandwagon, too, albeit in a catalog-sales-only fashion...
Other scenes from that episode: 1599: Things Are Looking Up (6/13/99) How about that? Sears wasn't kidding after all; it looks like they're really serious about this whole iMac thing. Yes, we finally saw the long-fabled Sears commercial with three dads who were, in our opinion, showing possibly just a little too much enthusiasm while balancing checkbooks and writing email to government officials via their iMacs-- but hey, we're talking about Commercialville, here, where housewives wax eloquent about the virtues of non-abrasive bathroom cleanser while grinning like synchronized swimmers or those high school cheerleaders who compete in the national finals... 1600: They're Everywhere (6/13/99) Where we grew up, Sears wasn't the only big fish in the little mall pond; the other large retail department store at the local mall was JCPenney, and so, in our eyes, those were the two department stores in existence...
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