Ooooo, that's gotta smart... Folks, you may recall that last week we brought your attention to a Wired article which postulated that, given the current market climate as far as Microsoft's stock is concerned, it might not be long before Bill Gates was supplanted as the world's richest man by Oracle CEO (and Steve Jobs's bestest buddy) Larry Ellison. At the time, a mere $5.6 billion separated the two in the "filthy lucre" race, based on the number of shares of stock each man had in his own company, multiplied by the then-current stock price-- ORCL's been weathering the storm, while MSFT had just gotten the beatdown of a lifetime.

Actually, we take that back: Monday's savage beating may have been worse, relatively speaking, as Microsoft's stock got its butt kicked all over the trading floor. When the dust cleared, MSFT was down over twelve points-- while ORCL was up two. That prompted faithful viewer Carter Adler to ask us whether we could provide an update on Larry's push for the top spot. Well, just to keep an eye on the race, we cobbled together a little web applet that fetches the current MSFT and ORCL share prices, multiplies them by the number of shares held by Bill and Larry as reported by Wired, and reports back who's richer and by how much. (No, it's not publicly available yet, but we'll let you know when it is.) Guess what? At close of business on Monday, it told us that "Larry has $49.98 billion, Bill has $49.37 billion. Larry's richer by about $0.6129 billion."

Now, this is all rather simplistic, of course. In fact, some would call our "World's Richest Man" methodology downright sloppy. For one thing, it's absurd to think that Bill's and Larry's respective net worths are comprised entirely of each man's holding in his own company; odds are they've both got a few bucks they've forgotten in the pockets of their winter coats, a handful of change under the couch cushions, a coffee can full of pennies on the dresser, etc. And for another thing, just because Larry may now be richer than Bill, that doesn't mean that someone else isn't now richer than both of them. Still, we thought it was an interesting development.

Alas, the "official" numbers still show Bill in the lead. Carter reported back that "the CBS Evening News just announced that 'Larry Ellison is worth about 48 billion dollars, about a billion or so behind Gates.'" And the Today Show on NBC reported the Larry-Bill differential to be "a couple billion" following Monday's stock activity-- noting also that Bill had lost $35.5 billion on paper in the past month. So it sounds like Larry's got a little ways to go before he can claim the top spot, but there's no doubt that the "Redmond Justice" case-- engineered in part by buddy Steve, it's said-- has put him back in the running. (Update: at broadcast time, the Larry-Bill differential reported by our applet had risen to $1.35 billion in Larry's favor; maybe he'll be crowned officially later today...)

If politics make strange bedfellows, then lawsuits can be like 9 1/2 Weeks meets Caligula. According to an AsiaBizTech article, Apple's lawyers and Microsoft's-- whose interaction over the years has typically been locked into "Cobra vs. Mongoose" mode-- have actually joined forces. What could make these longstanding bitter enemies kiss and make up? Why, no less than the daunting specter of software piracy, of course. Heck, even Adobe's leaped into the fray on this one; it seems that the three corporations have banded together to file suit against LEC Tokyo Legalmind Co., Ltd., "the largest vocational law school in Japan."

Apparently LEC has been training its country's future lawyers using scads of illegally-copied software. (In-house counsel at AtAT headquarters has advised me to refrain from making the obvious lawyer jokes, the penalty for which is an unspecified number of nights sleeping on the couch.) This is no small-scale, some-secretary-duped-a-copy-of-Excel kind of scenario, either; the plaintiffs are suing for "about $1.1 million... in damages and legal costs." That may not sound like a lot, but do the math and see how many copies of Mac OS 9 that would buy. See, the Tokyo District Court granted a search order, which revealed that there were 545 illegal copies of various Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft products installed on the 136 computers checked. Apparently legal copies of Photoshop at LEC are harder to find than a major label recording artist who isn't suing Napster.

Reportedly LEC originally planned to settle out of court, but the two sides "could not agree on damages and other issues," so it's a-litigatin' they'll go. What's really kind of neat is how Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft-- three companies whose combined market cap is something like $385 billion-- all joined forces to file a measly little $1.1 million lawsuit in Japan. They're obviously not in it for the money; they're out to make an example of a high-profile "respectable" software pirater in hopes of raising awareness about the potential ramifications of the problem. Hey, it's almost as effective as an after-school special.

Ladies and gentlemen, the sky has officially fallen. According to a Real Networks press release, RealPlayer is squarely in the lead among the "Big 3" streaming Internet media architectures. Quoting a Nielsen//NetRatings report, the company crows that, over the course of the past three months, "usage of the RealPlayer grew by more than 2.2 million users, from 19.6 million users per month to 21.8 million users." That's a whole lotta streaming going on. Furthermore, Real notes that RealPlayer's usage growth is "far outpacing" the growth of Windows Media and our own beloved QuickTime.

But that's not the real tragedy here. See, Windows Media usage is growing more quickly than QuickTime-- that in itself isn't necessarily surprising, since QuickTime's been around a lot longer, so there are more non-Windows Media users to convert. But what's really signalling the end of the universe is that, for the first time ever, there are more people using Windows Media (8.6 million) than QuickTime (7.5 million). That's right; QuickTime is third. Somebody brain us with a large rock, because seeing Microsoft swallow up yet another market isn't a sight we're eager to see in this lifetime.

We can only hope that Nielsen's NetRatings are as flawed as its television ratings, and that a handful of web surfers with a little black box are each being counted as 1.2 million viewers, or something. Otherwise, Apple's really going to have to pull something huge; evidently exclusive movie trailers and a free streaming server aren't enough. Hey, iWon.com's doing well with the "win tons of cash" angle; why not have all QuickTime streams ping back to Apple's servers, and pick one lucky viewer a month to win a million bucks? And to promote the server end, give a million to the broadcaster who's serving the stream, too. Do something, at any rate... It's time to buy some market share.