April 20th, 2000

[11:30 AM] Steve Jobs Appears On CNBC, Makes Appropriate CEO Noises by Staff Steve Jobs appeared on CNBC last night, after his company's CFO announced the company's 2nd Quarter results earlier in the afternoon. The Mac Observer covered that press conference live. We have also presented a detailed analysis of those results. CNBC asked whether this was the first stock split in 13 years for Apple. Steve replied "I don't know that, but it's the first split since I've been back." It is in fact the first split since 1987, a little more than 2 years after Mr. Jobs was booted from Apple by John Sculley and the Board of Directors. When asked about performance across the product line, Mr. Jobs responded "We saw particular strength in the Pro line. We have seen strength in the consumer market before, but now we are seeing the Pro line do well thanks to a strong offering. We try to make products that delight our customers. We currently have the strongest product line we have had in our history." The Digital Video market is also starting catch the interest of the markets, something which has been slow in coming. CNBC asked Mr. Jobs to explain what iMovie was and specifically said that most people don't understand it. Mr. Jobs replied "With any of our products, including iMac, you can make your own movies. You can take your camcorder, plug it into your iMac and edit it right on your computer. You can stick a CD in and add a soundtrack too. When you are finished, you can then make a VHS tape or another copy, and send it wherever you want. I think this is amazing." Mr. Jobs also commented when asked about the Dot-Com companies and referred to them as being overvalued. He went on to differentiate Apple from those companies because they have a viable product line and are profiting. The Mac Observer Spin: CNBC has been pretty good to Apple during the last few years, and we are always delighted to see Mr. Jobs be a guest. Of interest though is that Mr. Jobs appeared to be the CEO of Apple for the first time. By that we mean that he seemed to be giving more answers by rote, something that was not the case before he took the official title of CEO. And another thing: Has anyone noticed that Mr. Jobs is referred to as the CEO, despite the fact that he specifically stated during the MACWORLD SF keynote that he would retain the title of iCEO. At that time he said the "i" would refer to "internet" instead of "interim." It seems that this has been swept aside in the dustbin of irrelevancy, but we were fond of the iCEO title. A quick visit to Apple's Executive Profile for Mr. Jobs shows that his official title is indeed CEO. iToo iBad. Speaking of ghosts from the past, Mr. Sculley was the marketing wiz behind the Pepsi Challenge from the late 70's and early 80's, and that too has recently been brought back by Pepsi, though to our knowledge Mr. Sculley is not also returning to Pepsi. It was the strength of campaigns like that and other marketing efforts that helped raise Pepsi from an also-ran to Coca-Cola to a strong challenger to Coke's market leadership. That in turn was part of what made Mr. Sculley attractive to Steve Jobs and Apple's Board of Directors in 1983. By all indications, it's a small world. Apple