Microsoft Fights Back

It was the company cofounder's final flourish in a bravura 90-minute performance at San Francisco's annual Macworld fest, where he also introduced a new line of powerful minitower G3 machines, styled with the same eye-opening panache as the iMacs and featuring a very cool door that opens to allow access to its innards. He also reported progress on Apple's attempt to win back the computer-gamesters, with an endorsement from the author of the ultimate click-and-kill program, Quake II. He showed Apple's new Web server software. And he shared the stage with a Microsoft rep who demo'ed a new Mac version of the Explorer browser--with features not yet implemented in the Windows version (notably, a way to cleanly print out Web pages).

But maybe Jobs's best news was a lack of color (red) in Apple's bottom line: a fifth consecutive profitable quarter. Not bad for a company once considered . . . interim.

© 1999