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It's All About The Wings (12/22/00)
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Okay, Monday-morning quarterbacks-- where did Apple go wrong? Why, after hitting a split-adjusted price of $75 earlier this year, is the company's stock currently gasping for breath at under $15 a share? It's all well and good to rattle off the same mistakes that Steve has enumerated at various public self-flagellatory appearances-- the poorly-handled reorganization of educational sales, the "Market? What market?" focus and premium pricing of the Cube, the ludicrously wide "Megahertz Gap" coupled with the simplemindedness of the buying public, etc. But those are presumably symptomatic of some greater, more basic cause, right? After all, it's not like Steve to steer us so wrong. So what really caused all those missteps?
Well, Graef Crystal over at Bloomberg has a theory: Steve was distracted by something-- something fast, and expensive, and oh-so-glamorous. No, it's not Ivana Trump. We'll give you a little hint: it rhymes with "Shmulfstream Shmet." Yes, apparently the blame for this entire mess can be pinned squarely on Steve's shiny new toy, the Gulfstream V private jet that Apple's board gave him last January. As Graef points out, ever since Steve took delivery of his flying machine, Apple's woes have steadily increased on the Pain Index.
So what do you think-- too much flying the jet, not enough steering the company? Or perhaps Steve's always out washing the thing in the driveway when he should be spending more time working on his next insanely great product idea. We can see him out there in a T-shirt and cut-offs, hosing the thing down... his wife yells, "Steve, Fred Anderson's on the phone; something about this quarter's sales figures?" and Steve yells back, "I'll call him later-- I still have to do the Turtle Wax." And now what do we have? An expected loss of a quarter of a billion dollars. Little did the board know that a simple gift like a private jet could set in motion a chain of events of such disastrous proportions. Hopefully for Christmas they got him something simpler, like maybe a fruitcake.
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 12/22/00 episode: December 22, 2000: While chatting with some developers in Germany, Apple decides to come clean about Mac OS X's release. Meanwhile, at least one observer thinks that Apple's woes can be traced back to Steve's jet, and the Mac OS Smiley Face has been spotted holding down not one, but two extra jobs these days...
Other scenes from that episode: 2759: You Can't Handle The Truth (12/22/00) The conflicting Mac OS X release rumors are flying fast and furious now, and the shouting has reached a fever pitch. By now we've heard 'em all: Mac OS X 1.0 to be launched on Steve Jobs's birthday, February 24th, with no more betas; Mac OS X Public Beta 2 to be released at the Expo, with the 1.0 release following a few months later; Mac OS X "Power User Release" to materialize at the Stevenote; Apple to rename the operating system "Mac OS XI," now due in mid-2002; etc... 2761: The Mighty Have Fallen (12/22/00) Further signs of a slowing economy: while Apple's recent financial woes didn't lead to any actual layoffs (at least, none of which we're aware), there was a hiring freeze instituted, and now we've got more evidence that certain Apple employees may have taken pay cuts...
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