Bill, Bill, Bill... Is that fear we smell? We know that your recent "fireside chat" commercial was carefully engineered to draw attention to your "even billionaires shop at T.J. Maxx" sweater and away from the hunted look in your eyes, but even without the miracle of Smell-O-Vision, we still thought we detected a whiff of Eau de Deer in Headlights wafting from the direction of the TV. (Or maybe we dropped a half-eaten Tofu Pup behind the set a couple of weeks ago-- we can never be too sure.) Anyway, the sheer surreality of the whole thirty-second spot effectively blinded us to your real plan for dealing with your company's potential Death by a Zillion Lawsuits, which became clear as day during your WinHEC keynote address: pretend like the government's lawsuit doesn't exist, adopt a new slogan and run it into the ground, and take nervous and irrelevant swipes at the competition.

WinHEC, for the uninitiated, isn't where naughty Microsoft operating systems go after they die if they weren't quite evil enough for WinHELL; it's the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference. And what better place for Bill to break in a new slogan than in front of his legions of adoring fans? Read about it at ZDNet; deftly avoiding any mention whatsoever of the "Redmond Justice" fracas and MSFT's resulting earthward tumble, the spiritual leader of the western world repeated his closing mantra from the sweater commercial. Yes, evidently Microsoft has decided to retire their tired, old "Where do you want to go today?" slogan, replacing it instead with a brand new tired, old slogan: "The best is yet to come." Now that's innovation, baby!

But what really reeks of fear was Bill's nasty jab at the iMac-- a friendly little computer what never done no harm to nobody nohow. Claiming that the upcoming and lamely-named "Windows ME" operating system will boot in a mere twenty-five seconds (uh, on what kind of computer? Details, schmetails), Bill drew an unpleasant comparison to Apple's best-selling consumer system, which he claims takes a minute and ten seconds to start up. "We could have demonstrated that," he intoned, "but we just don't have the time for it." Har de har har. The other reason he didn't demonstrate it is that it's apparently a big fat lie; a MacCentral reader timed his iMac/333 booting and says it clocked in at 46 seconds. Note that that's not even a current iMac running the current version of the Mac OS. Evidently Microsoft didn't learn a thing from the trial; those guys still think that if it can be faked on tape, it must be true.

Never mind the fact, of course, that the current development version of Mac OS X reportedly boots "vital services" on a G3/450 in 21 seconds. The real question to ask yourself is, is this really going to be Microsoft's grand marketing strategy to sell Windows ME-- it reboots faster? Let's give them the benefit of the doubt for a second and assume that, yes, when the OS ships, a WinME system will boot forty-five seconds faster than an iMac. Let's also assume that, for whatever reason, I start up and shut down my iMac every day instead of using that nifty "Sleep" feature. Why, by switching to a WinME system, I could save myself over five minutes a week! Ooooh, sign us up! Yup, it's fear we smell, plain and simple.

Seeing as we're currently mired solidly in the middle of what we can only assume is a pre-WWDC news drought, why don't we take another look at Larry Ellison's race to replace Bill Gates as the world's richest man? After all, money's a big ratings-getter-- more so when we're talking about billions. Just yesterday we told you that, based purely on our half-assed calculations of each man's stock holdings in his own company, Larry had edged Bill out of the top slot; in fact, Wired is now reporting the same thing. Sadly, though, when each guy's other holdings are taken into account, it seems that Bill's still pretty far out ahead.

On the plus side, we now have better numbers with which to make our calculations. Wired has graciously given us what is supposedly the exact share count of each man (Gates has 740,964,300 shares of MSFT and Larry has 689,706,050 shares of ORCL, in case you're keeping score at home). On top of that, the Associated Press gives some hints about each man's outside holdings; Gates apparently has about $10 billion in some form that isn't Microsoft stock (smart man), while Ellison's got a mere $200 million in property. Let's see, here... We pump those numbers into our calculations, and voilà! It seems that Bill's got around $62.5 billion compared to Larry's $53.2, so he's still up by about $9.3 billion. (And both guys are well ahead of the current third-place holder, Warren Buffett, who's got about $28 billion.)

So all we can say is, if Larry's serious about wrestling the title away from Bill, he's going to have to pray for another big MSFT tumble-- and one that doesn't take ORCL with it. Assuming Oracle's share price holds steady, it looks to us like Microsoft's stock would have to fall over twelve more points before Larry's overall net worth overtakes Bill's. Sound unlikely? Perhaps. But don't forget, "Redmond Justice" is a great catalyst, and the government's official recommendation on Microsoft's penalty is due this Friday. Depending on the results, we may see another panicked weekend after-hours sell-off. Larry's other chance is to get ORCL to shoot up over thirteen points, but frankly, we think the Microsoft deflation's a likelier event in the short term. Gosh, whoever knew that numbers could be so much fun?

Have you heard about this giant Tetris game that some students threw together over at Brown University? We first read about it over at MacRumors; according to an Associated Press article, these guys actually built a working, playable version of Tetris out of ten thousand Christmas lights. The thing stands ten stories tall. Evidently no one told these enterprising young folks that the longstanding trend in computer technology is to make things smaller. Think different, indeed.

And heck, smaller isn't always cooler. Sure, you can play Tetris on your digital watch, but is that really as gosh-darned nifty as playing Tetris on the side of a 14-story university science library? Woz doesn't think so. "The Other Steve" who co-founded Apple actually flew down to Brown to take the giant Tetris game for a spin. And if the inventor of the original Apple computer and the proprietor of the WozCam thinks something's cool, then you can bet your sweet patootie it's cool, dagnabbit.

Unless, of course, Woz is there as a secret undercover envoy for the company he co-founded. Remember, Apple hasn't exactly been one to follow industry trends these days-- remember the whole "G4 Speed Dump" fiasco? Pay more for a slower machine? We wouldn't be terribly surprised if Apple's scoping out the students' "embiggening" technology to use in upcoming products. Imagine an iBook that's the size of a Volvo and weighs three hundred pounds. Pointless? Sure. Cool? Indisputably! (And as for the whole Tetris thing, we're only slightly impressed; call us when they have Unreal Tournament running on six thousand Lite Brites.)