POLL TEN stock analysts and nine will list "Internet strategy" as their top investing criterion, but ask those nine exactly what an Internet strategy is and you'll probably get blank stares. Desperate to please, but equally confused, stock-conscious companies have been sent into tizzies like randomly punished rats in a Skinner box. Is an on-line store an Internet strategy? How about free e-mail? Even as Apple was rebounding last year with its popular iMac, analysts grumbled that the company was still stuck in the old economy model of producing products rather than services. Rumblings began that unless Apple soon announced some sort of an Internet strategy, whatever that might be, the company would be relegated to the old world and its stock would lose its "strong buy" rating. This, say insiders, is why Apple concocted the iTools suite of Web goodies and proclaimed that these less-than-groundbreaking items -- free email, greeting cards, on-line file storage -- would form the core of a redesigned apple.com site. Those who don't look closely at statistics could find vindication in the iTools gambit: After all, analysts upgraded the stock of what they saw as a newly wired corporation, and Apple's site jumped to the top of PC Data's list of hardware sites last week with 1.4 million visitors. But what's driving the page hits isn't the anemic iTools, which have found little favor among even the staunchest Macophile Web sites. What's behind the numbers is Apple's real Internet strategy -- one that's hardly consumer driven.

It's hard to imagine anyone other than Steve Jobs touting iTools as the Great Leap Forward and not getting laughed off stage. The iTools he unveiled with great fanfare are not idiot-proof Internet appliances along the lines of the i-opener, they're not handheld Macs, they're not even part of a server-centric "portable desktop" in the dumb terminal vein (versions currently under study at Oracle and Microsoft). They're not even an extension of Apple's growing QuickTime TV network of streaming-media providers, powered in partnership with Akamai. Instead, it's a motley collection of Web-based services for users who log in, services that follow slavishly where other companies have trod. In the bluemountain.com or americangreetings.com vein, there's Apple's electronic greeting cards -- sorry, iCards. There's iReview, Apple's "Critical Guide to the Web" emulation of deja.com, except that iReview has received one and only one update to its scant content in four months. The other iTools -- from a free e-mail address to the Web content-screening KidSafe to iDisk, a X-drive.com-like free 20MB of Web-based storage -- depend on built-in features of the latest version of the Mac OS and so are unavailable to users of previous versions. Even Microsoft has a more interesting prospect with its Next Generation Windows services, which threaten to stream Windows functionality over the Web.

And iTools are not what's driving traffic to Apple's site. A high percentage of apple.com's visitors are users seeking vital system and other software updates that used to be available on CD-ROMs packaged in various Mac magazines. This off-line distribution method was a more practical and far less costly option for those parts of the world where dial-up Net access incurs costly charges per minute. Apple, however, has clamped down on this practice, leaving apple.com as the only source for these necessary updates. It's no shocker that the week Apple went number one on the charts was the same week the company released a long-awaited OS update, available for download only at the company's site.

Therein lies Apple's true Internet strategy. Even with the awkward cosmetics of iTools, the goal is to get people onto Apple's site, not only to expose them to the Apple brand but to drive up exactly the numbers that PC Data charted. If an exclusive catalog does it, so much the better -- for the company. It's the old utilitarian algebra: If millions suffer slightly to benefit the one a million-fold, isn't that a moral wash?