In the wake of massive losses and widespread debate about its very survival, Apple Computer Inc has developed a brazen plan that would not only ensure its continued existence, but would propel it to the very pinnacle of the computer industry, famed computer journalist Louie’s Keyhole revealed in CI No 2,838. Very soon, confided Apple’s doomed chief executive Michael Spindoktor, we will be prepared to launch a takeover bid for IBM. Spindokter is of course history, but his works live on in the expert hands of corporate escapologist Astrid Gilberto Amelia Earhardt. Sources have told the New York Times that sources will soon be telling the Wall Street Journal that sources have just told Reuters that sources refused to confirm to the San Jose Mercury News that the New York Times will tomorrow print that while sources say the talks with Some Microsystems have not been confirmed as at an end, Earhardt may even now not after all be seeking to raise the capital needed to buy IBM on Wall Street. IBM will still not comment on the possibility of an Apple takeover, but Sam Albatross, formerly a spokesman for IBM and soon to be a former spokesman for New York’s Comical Bank, specializes in getting quoted in the press, and has a word for every occasion, and often for none.
Vacuous verbiage
Unofficially, Albatross confided, because my current relationship to IBM is as an independent commentator trying to ingratiate myself, I can only provide innocuous and vacuous verbiage suitable for bridging otherwise disconnected segments of an article. I’m a journalist’s best friend. Now, regarding your questions, I believe it is fair and inoffensive to predict that whatever happens, it will be good for Apple, for IBM, for customers and most importantly for independent commentators. Another source close to IBM is Bosneen Serbovich, self-styled visionary, financial analyst, political crusader and sycophant to the stars. Said Serbovich, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: ‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.’ Perhaps the most skeptical view of an Apple-IBM combine was expressed by the outspoken chief executive of Some Microsystems, Snoop McDogeatdog. For years a hardware vendor specialising in engineering workstations, Some achieved widespread prominence last year as its programming language, Coca, and its slogan, The Network Is A Line, became the most widely misunderstood phenomena in the entire computer industry. IBM, said McDogeatdog, is trying to sell its outmoded products in a market that includes more than two hundred thousand hostile ex-employees who are now working for its customers, its competitors and all the top consulting companies. Its weakest offerings, like OS/2, are already dogmeat. The PowerPC is, so to speak, next. By Hesh Wiener Apple wanted us to buy them out, and we made a generous offer. We said we would take over the company and fire every single employee if they paid us $25 a share and assumed the mortgage on my exercise machine. But Apple’s board didn’t appreciate the wisdom of my suggestion. So, I took the weekend off to play golf and visit my orthodontist, who, incidentally, is the same one used by Hollywood stars like Bugs Bunny. Another company widely believed to be one of Apple’s spurned suitors is the database software maker, Orca. Its fiercely energetic founder and chairman, Larry Testosterone, spoke while juggling three Bosendorfers and a cellular phone, on which he was simultaneously arranging a very unusual date, but maybe not for him, with the four Lee sisters, Ora, Ana, Virginia and Manuella. I just don’t see any point to the deal, Testosterone ejaculated. The entire computer business is about to boil down to two things: Orca software, which of course we have, and Internet terminals that cost no more than this railroad spike I am pounding into my concrete floor with by bare foot as we speak. Now get out of my face. I’m a busy man. I’m overdue at the recycling centre, where I tear phone books into little pieces. Journalist Stewart Sopitup is widely but surreptitiously read by his colleagues and rivals, who bitterly resent him for blatantly displaying four obnoxious traits that make his differences with the rest of the press absolutely irreconcilable: he is basically intelligent, he has a good sense of humour, he has an excellent command of the English language and he is honest. I’ve been rescued from perfection, Sopitup admits, by my sentimentality for Apple, which grew from an eccentricity into a perversion and finally into an obsession. Threesticks I loved the Macintosh for bringing an aesthetic to computing, and I still do. I loved the Newton because it is such a cute idea, and I still believe it will work one of these days even though that faith is obviously a victory of hope over experience. And now I really love my portable phone because it lets me take those frustrating calls from PR guys when I’m on the toilet. I guess it’s all over for Motorola. Anyway, as for IBM, I don’t particularly like or dislike it, which bodes well for its future. Whether or not Apple completes its planned takeover of IBM, one company will somehow figure out how to turn the result to its advantage: Midas Soft. Its chief executive, William H Threesticks, outwitted both Apple and IBM at a time when both companies were presumed to have some wits. Both Apple’s loss of power and IBM’s perpetual restructuring are held to be byproducts of Midas Soft’s rise to dominance of the systems software market, even though Bill Threesticks says he just got lucky. I’m always fascinated, said Threesticks, by what the rest of the industry does with the crumbs that fall through my fingers. From the February 1996 edition of Infoperspectives, published by Technology News of America, 110 Greene St, Suite 1101, NY NY 10012, phone 212-3349750 (C) 1996 Technology News of America Co, Inc. All rights reserved.
