Outbreak! Call in a containment unit, stat! Remember back when the UK's Consumer Association (now operating under the arguably snazzier but far more confusing name "Which?"-- remember, kids, just say no to punctuation in proper names) complained to the Office of Fair Trading about Apple's pricing and sales policies at the UK iTunes Music Store? Specifically, they had a beef with the way in which UK residents had to pay 79p per track, roughly 11p more than the 99 cents that other European Union countries had to pay at their respective iTMSeseses. More to the point, UK tune junkies couldn't just choose to buy their songs from, say, the French or German stores instead, since the iTMS limits purchases to folks with a credit card billing address in the same country as the store. This, claims Which?, is a clear violation of EU "free movement" rules.

Well, the situation has just escalated; it's spread from the UK to Brussels. As reported by a BBC News article pointed out by faithful viewer John Blackburne, the OFT has decided that since "iTunes operates in more than three European Union member states," it's going to sidestep the whole mess by passing the buck to the European Commission. So now the Commission is going to have to determine whether Apple is doing something unjustifiably naughty by gouging UK customers for an extra 11p per song.

To be fair, it's getting increasingly hard to back Apple's stance on the pricing discrepancy. Its only comment on the situation thus far is to insist that it prices its songs based on "the underlying economic model in each country," comparing the situation to the discrepancy between "the price of CDs in the US versus the UK." And sure, that makes perfect sense... except that if UK shoppers really wanted to, they're perfectly free to order a CD from the US instead of buying it locally. (We, ourselves, just went the reverse route; it's not out in the U.S., but the new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Tertiary Phase radio show-- you know, the brand new one based on Life, The Universe, And Everything-- is available on CD from Amazon.co.uk, complete with 20 minutes of material that wasn't broadcast this fall, so we gladly snapped it up and paid a ton for shipping.)

In other words, Amazon.com doesn't lock out orders from UK customers, but Europeans can't buy from the European iTMS of their choice, which we're told is a pretty clear no-no from an EU trade standpoint. Not that we're saying that Apple has much choice in the matter, at least in terms of "free movement" rules; the record labels dictate to which countries Apple can sell a song, so until they come on board and license their songs EU-wide (and why haven't they? Someone sic the EC on those guys!), the per-country sales restriction will probably have to stand.

Given that reality, though, Apple's "stuff costs different in different countries" argument looks a little weak, particularly in light of the fact that other European download services charge UK customers roughly the same price as those in other European countries; MSN Music, for example, charges "99 cents in the eurozone and 69p in the UK." We suppose that Apple might get off on a technicality by claiming that the same song offered in two different countries actually constitutes two different products, since each one is licensed by the "manufacturer" for sale only in a particular region. Still, though, unless Apple can say that it pays more wholesale for UK-licensed songs than for ones licensed for sale elsewhere in Europe (which may indeed be the case; only Steve Jobs knows for sure), we imagine there may be an EC-mandated discount coming to UK customers sometime next year...

Accursed analysts! They've dealt Apple's stock another downgrade-- this time from Charles Wolf of Needham & Co.-- which lopped another $2.53 off the share price, erasing all of the gains from... er... well, okay, from analyst upgrades made a few days before. But still, it seems mighty rude. Granted, maybe we should be blaming the investors, instead, since these downgrades are from "buy" to "hold," and investors clearly aren't holding, or else the stock wouldn't have dropped five or six bucks in the past few days. But you can't tell us that those analysts didn't know what would happen. For shame! And during the holidays, too!

The thing that's so irksome about the whole situation, though, is that none of these analysts is actually saying anything bad. Both of the ones who downgraded Apple's stock last week actually maintain price targets higher than the current share price, and one actually raised his earnings forecasts for Apple's fiscal 2005 and 2006. Sure, it's not as cool as setting a three-digit price target and pledging eternal faith in and allegiance to the Church of Steve, but it's still good stuff. Consider another example: faithful viewer frozen tundra informs us that in a CBS MarketWatch article (found via MacMinute), Rebecca Runkle of Morgan Stanley predicts that the personal computer market will experience a growth slowdown next year-- but that Apple still stands to gain.

Yup, while Runkle expects unit shipments of PCs to grow by only 9 percent next year, she figures that Apple shows one of "the best chances of gaining market share in 2005" because it should "continue to benefit from the momentum of the iPod and its recent new iMac release." Moreover, Runkle attributes the projected PC sales slowdown to a lack of "'meaningful acceleration' in the enterprise business sector"-- and since Apple generally doesn't sell Macs into the big business market (yet), the company could likely win a market share boost simply due to a heavier consumer ratio in the overall market mix.

All good stuff, right? And still more indication that Apple ought to have one heckuva fine 2005. Unfortunately, positive comments about potential market share increases like Runkle's mean squat to the stock price in light of a buy-to-hold downgrade, which is why we're so ambivalent about the whole analyst thing in the first place; you can get a roomful of them saying nice things about Apple and its prospects for the coming year, but as soon as one or two also mention that it might be a good time to stop buying more shares, blammo-- the price hits freefall. That said, we realize that it's unreasonable to expect a steady stream of upgrades all the time; after all, eventually all the analysts would rate AAPL a "buy," and there's be nowhere to go but down. What to do?

Simple: add more analysts! Why not? After all, an analyst is just "one that analyzes"; you apparently don't need a college degree or anything like that. As such, we volunteer: AtAT today announces that it initiates coverage of AAPL with a "hold," and on Monday we'll upgrade it to a "buy." On Tuesday we'll cease coverage of the stock, retire, and let someone else have a turn. Nothing but two or three upgrades a week for life! Any volunteers for slot number two? In order to get anyone to take you seriously as an analyst you might need a tie, but don't worry, ThinkGeek has some doozies-- and it's a small price to pay to keep AAPL swimming in life-giving upgrades.

What with a steady stream of anticompetitive behavior, bug-ridden software, security compromises, virus epidemics, etc., there's always plenty of perfectly valid reasons to criticize the Redmond Beast on Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day. For instance, we could tackle the Internet Explorer patch that faithful viewer Andy Mushynski brought to our attention, which was so critical it made Microsoft break its once-a-month Patch Day schedule. Or we could raise the topic of how, as faithful viewer Gerben Wierda pointed out last week, Microsoft more or less personally bribed the president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association with a 10 million dollar "bonus" to get him to settle a European antritrust suit, against the wishes of several members of the association itself. Always plenty of grist for the mill, as they say.

But somehow none of that stuff is ever as satisfying as making vaguely unjustified personal attacks on Steve "Ape With a Body Wax" Ballmer. Go figure.

So away we go! You may recall that a couple of weeks ago, Ballmer told a convention crowd that Microsoft Ubermeister Bill Gates receives roughly 4 million spam messages a day. At the time we were only the slightest bit incredulous, since sometimes it feels like we get at least half that many ourselves. Had we actually sat and thought about it for a while, though, it might have occurred to us that an average of 46 spams a second of every minute of every hour of every godforsaken spam-soaked day does, in fact, sound a little high, even for someone who reportedly has a whole department at Microsoft filtering his mail for him.

But here's the thing: faithful viewer insaneTroll (hey, it takes all kinds of fruit to make fruit cup) dished us a Detroit Free Press article which reports that "Ballmer said he misspoke a few days back when he was quoted as saying Gates gets 4 million e-mails a day." What Ballmer insists he meant to say was that Gates gets 4 million messages a year, "most of it junk." Which is just a slight difference.

We're not saying that isn't still a lot of spam, mind you; 4 million messages a year breaks down to seven or eight messages a minute, which is still a lot to sift through, and we don't envy the poor Microsoftians who have to separate the wheat from the spam before it gets served up to Billy-Boy. But the fact is, if Ballmer was off by a factor of 365 when talking about Bill's spam rate, that casts a pall of potential inaccuracy over a lot of his other public statements, too-- and not just the ones involving math.

Perhaps sensing this with some sort of primitive animal intuition that functions as an evolutionary precursor to intelligence, Ballmer took the opportunity to review some of his recent statements and issued a few more corrections, just for the record. When he was quoted earlier this year as saying that "there has never been a platform more open" than Windows," what he'd actually meant to say was "Windows comes in a box that you can open." "The most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen'" was actually supposed to have come out of his mouth as "I commonly listen to music on stolen iPods." And when he said that "Linux violates more than 228 patents," he really intended to say "ook ook, fire bad, give me a banana."

Lord help him, he's trying. Given the evolutionary state of his brain, you really have to give him credit-- and also, if you don't want him to lunge snarling at your neck, some sort of fruit.