The San Jose Mercury News believes that Steve Jobs was largely responsible for the ousting of Gil Amelio as chief executive of Apple Computer Inc on Wednesday night. Although Jobs is not a member of the Apple board, his opinions apparently carry a lot of weight, and the Mercury says that he was also behind the Newton Inc spin-off, the swingeing cuts in Apple’s research department, and the scrapping of OpenDoc and Open Transport in favor of alternative technologies from Next Inc. Meanwhile, Apple is no longer saying when it will get back into the black: under Amelio it had been predicting a return to profit in the fourth quarter of this year.
