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The Great Stock Selloff II (8/21/00)
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Think back a few years, when Steve Jobs had just engineered Gilbert Amelio's "sudden departure" from Apple and started acting as "interim CEO" of the company. Do you recall the smell of distrust hanging heavy in the air wherever Mac users gathered for moral support? After all, there were plenty of reasons to be skeptical: Steve's use of a PC laptop instead of a PowerBook manufactured by the very company he was supposed to be saving; his infamous temper and mercurial nature, which got him kicked out of his own company ten years earlier; and perhaps the most distressing of all, the rumor that he had sold every single share of Apple stock he owned except for one-- which he only kept to remain on Apple's board of directors.
What's more, that particular rumor turned out to be 100% true; Steve himself later admitted in an interview that he did in fact dump all of his Apple stock, because at the time he couldn't see things getting any better under the "leadership" of Amelio. We've even heard conspiracy theories that Steve actually dumped his shares just to send the price of AAPL still lower-- a circumstance that he then used to get Gil fired. Regardless, our point is this: when the cofounder of a multibillion-dollar company sells off all his shares but one, that's a pretty universal sign of "things are even worse than you folks out there in TV Land can possibly imagine. Cash out now." Sure, Steve turned the company around and even got handed a slew of new stock options eventually, but the whole stock selloff thing was a huge issue at the time.
That said, let's take a look at a completely unrelated story, shall we? According to Reuters, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen is selling off yet more of his MSFT stock. Since February, the man has sold nearly fifty million shares, totalling about $4.2 billion in cash value. Even more entertaining are the rumors flying that Paul is amassing a ton of money so he can buy one of Microsoft's biggest competitors: the Linux services company Red Hat. Some people might jump to conclusions and surmise that one of the original Microsoft alpha geeks sees no future in Windows and is preparing to jump ship. Now wherever do you suppose they got that idea?
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SceneLink (2496)
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 8/21/00 episode: August 21, 2000: Not satisfied with trading in a Twentieth Anniversary Mac for a new G4? Then throw your old PowerBook 5300 into the deal as well and get a cheap Pismo while you're at it. Meanwhile, Dartmouth College reports that for the first time ever, the incoming class is using more PCs than Macs, and a Microsoft bigwig is selling off a lot of MSFT shares; is an acquisition in the cards, or is this purely a vote of no confidence?...
Other scenes from that episode: 2494: Wanted: 5300, Dead Or Alive (8/21/00) Wouldn't you know it? Mere moments after we introduced what we hoped would be a delightfully wacky and subversive mental image (Steve Jobs recalling defective Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh units just so he could smash them to bits with a heavy blunt instrument), word came down that the whole "recall for mass destruction" concept isn't all that deranged after all... 2495: C+ For Effort; Try Harder (8/21/00) Maybe it's just us, but frankly, we kind of wish that Apple would stop issuing those annual big-convention press releases stating that "Apple is still number one in the education market." Why? Because the energy the company would save by not repeating that fact might be just enough energy to get Apple acting like the best again...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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