Oh, my my my... It seems that good ol' Gil Amelio has settled on a wonderfully effective defense mechanism to help deal with his failure to restore Apple to glory. It's no secret that the man was kicked in the head pretty hard when Apple's board gave him the boot, but in recent years, his strategy has been simple: he points to whatever successes that Apple may have accomplished in recent months, and then says it was all his idea. That may sound simple and painfully transparent, but hey, it seems to be working. Whatever gets him through the night, you know?

For instance, we just stumbled across a recent BusinessWeek interview with The Gilster (courtesy of MacCentral), and when asked for his "thoughts on Apple Computer these days," the man replied, "I can say that the strategy that we put in place during my term there seems to still be the guiding strategy for the company. I would have to say I'm proud that they've followed through. To the extent that they continue to stay focused on that plan, they will continue to do just fine." Gee, Gil, what plan was that? The one you put together about mustering the guts to end cloning despite such a move's short-term unpopularity, putting some shine and pride back into the existing Mac OS instead of hanging everyone's hopes on an operating system four years away, reversing your own trend towards more PC-like Macs (that must have been just to lull the competition into a false sense of security, huh?) by designing and shipping distinctive and innovative hardware, and actually advertising for a change? Or was it the plan that you scrawled on the back of an envelope that said "MAK APPLE PROFITUBLE AGIN"? The lack of detail is so convenient, isn't it? When Apple stumbles, Gil can just say, "oh, they stopped using my plan," and when it recovers, it's all about "see, they're using my plan again."

Now, we know there are some of you who do believe that Gil did most of the work engineering Apple's turnaround and Steve just came in and stole all the credit, but even if there's any truth to that, try to picture how Apple would be today if Gil were still running things and Steve were mostly out of the picture. Personally, we just see a big smoking crater where One Infinite Loop used to be-- because Gil's Apple would have continued to bleed a billion dollars a year (with small "profits" in each December quarter so Gil could collect his yearly bonus). Mac cloners would have kept sucking away sales from Apple because under Gil's regime Macs became increasingly cheaply-constructed and Wintel-like in nature, and were plagued by performance and stability nightmares. Apple's brand would mean nothing, or less than nothing. And retail stores? Yeah, right. No one can know what might have been, but our crystal ball says that two more years with Gil at the helm and Apple would have collapsed completely. But he can believe whatever he likes, just as long as he's happy...