Contradiction alert! Contradiction alert! Attention, all purely logical android-type constructs from the Star Trek universe: we recommend that you cease monitoring this program immediately, or else you risk exploding when faced with a recursive paradox. Remember the six weeks you spent in the repair shop when Kirk or whoever said "I'm lying"? Exactly. So do yourself a favor and skip the rest of today's episode, and we promise that tomorrow's show will be 100% free of those pesky logical ambiguities. Deal? Good. Now go oil your neck bolts or something.

As for the rest of you who can handle a bit of contradiction in your lives, check this out, because we thought it was kind of nifty: when speaking to BusinessWeek recently, Fearless Leader Steve had this to say about Wall Street analysts and their unhealthy obsession with market share: "We've got 25 million customers that want the best computers in the world. If our market share grows, we're thrilled. But we've held our own, while our rivals were losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year." In other words, says BusinessWeek, Jobs "wouldn't mind if those analysts would start measuring the Mac by the profits it produces, rather than by its market share." Got that? In the World According to Steve as described to BusinessWeek, profits equals good, market share equals bad. Okay.

Now take a look-see at a Newsweek article we found linked over at MacMinute, which explores the state of the Mac after its first twenty years on the planet. Over there, Steve has this to say about the sins of Apple's past: "Who ended up running the company? Sales guys. At the critical juncture in the late '80s, when they should have gone for market share, they went for profits... They behaved like a monopoly, and it came back to bite them, which always happens." What the huh? Suddenly Jobs says that market share is the thing to go for, and a focus on profits is what brought Apple to the brink of collapse. Market share good and profits bad? Or profits good and market share bad? Cannot compute... Cannot compute... Self-destruct sequence commencing in 5... 4... 3...

Okay, so it's not really a paradox, since Steve's talking about now versus then, and there's just a slight distinction between what makes a good measure of a company's success versus what goals a company should target at specific stages in its development. When you think about it, everything Steve says is completely consistent with his current actions; with the Mac boxed in as a minority platform, Apple focuses on satisfying the relatively small percentage of computer buyers who are willing to pay more for quality of design and attention to detail. That translates into profits, even on a low-market share product line. With the iPod, however, Apple is going all-out to broaden its user base and extend market share, just like Steve says Apple should have done with the Mac when it had the chance, before Windows 95 started to level the playing field.

So no, Steve isn't trying to blow up the heads of any robots; we just saw the surface-level flip-flop in the two articles and thought it was interesting. But we still had to warn those androids, because you just never know how they're going to take things, and we really didn't want to get stuck with any Star Trek universe repair bills. Those guys charge a mint.