Apple's plummeting stock price and new status as "formerly formerly beleaguered" already has us feeling like we've been warped back to 1997; we don't need any more help taking a nostalgic leap back to the Beige Era. That isn't stopping Microsoft from replaying the hits of the mid-late-'90s, however. Why, we can remember it like it was yesterday... sitting in that Boston auditorium, seeing Steve live and in person for the first time ever, and feeling the shock wave hit the crowd full force as Apple's newly-returned founder announced a "strategic partnership" with the Redmond Scourge itself. A $150 million investment from Microsoft in exchange for a litigation cease-fire and the agreement to be the latest shill for Internet Explorer? That night we took six showers and burned our clothes, but it was months before we felt clean again.

So here's the thing: Microsoft's doing it again. No, not for Apple-- sure, Steve admits that his company hit a "speed bump" (and at $9 billion in market capitalization, that's one expensive speed bump), but it's still profitable, it's still growing, and cash-on-hand isn't a particularly touchy subject, thank you very much. Instead, this time Microsoft's shelling out the ducats to a different beleaguered company that's been struggling over the past couple of years: Corel. According to MacCentral, the details of the bailout are eerily familiar; it's yet another "strategic partnership" in which Redmond ponys up a wad of cash (in this case, $135 million for the same type of non-voting stock the company bought from Apple) in exchange for certain... concessions.

Those concessions include the settlement of "outstanding legal issues" (the details of which are, unsurprisingly, not publicly available), which sure sounds a lot like the patent-resolution terms hammered out as a facet of the Apple-Microsoft detente. And this time, instead of enlisting Apple's help to put Internet Explorer on top in the browser wars, Microsoft's latest investment requires that Corel throw its weight behind the Redmond .NET scheme. So Corel's applications will become "rentable" over the 'net, meaning Microsoft's latest plan for world domination now has signed up the two most widely-used office suites in the world: its own, and WordPerfect Office.

Does anyone want to bet that Corel's loudly-voiced plans to market its applications to the Linux market will suddenly get very, very quiet-- sort of the way that the ClarisWorks marketing push seemed to slow down after the Apple-Microsoft deal? And isn't it interesting that in both instances, Microsoft has invested substantial amounts of filthy lucre in high-profile companies that are visible competitors, just when the government's stirring up antitrust trouble? The more things change, the more they stay slimy and retch-inducing.