It's fairly hard to reconcile the rumours of Atari's financial problems with
their announcement that they are going public. One goes public to attract
capital, which might suggest that they're cash-short, but it's rather hard
to find investors who would propose to sink money into a company on the
verge of going down the drain.

Since financial information on Atari is hard to obtain, it's hard to know
what's going on without looking at the prospectus. However, I suspect that
the accounts I've seen in places like INFOWORLD and BYTE are more likely
than most: Atari has been selling all the ST's they can make, but they can't
make enough. In that light, an IPO seems reasonable, in that it might help
them to afford more production equipment, warehousing, and inventory.