Stand back, folks, because Apple's not the only company starring in tawdry tell-all books these days. Barbarians Led By Bill Gates is a new book by former Microsoft developer Marlin Eller, who recounts the company's rise to power over the course of the thirteen years he worked there. It's shaping up to be a wonderful portrait of paranoia and slimeball business tactics. CNET has a few of the juicier details.

From the "fluke" of Windows 3.0's success to the "dumb luck" that led to Microsoft's divorce from IBM, this book appears to have something for everyone. For a sample of the slimy moves that led to Microsoft's success, consider the time that Microsoft had an employee covertly join a computer users' group the day before a competitor was scheduled to give a demo there; the Microsoft mole videotaped the whole presentation, then turned the tape over to Gates and company, who "dissected" the footage for a competitive upper hand. And Gates-haters worldwide will appreciate the anecdote about Eller, in front of Bill Gates, criticizing a broken portion of code as being a "brain-dead piece of $#!+" written by a "jerk--" not realizing that Gates had written that code himself...

Hmm, does this mean that, following the precedent Microsoft set by copying Apple's GUI, people who write about Microsoft are copying people who write about Apple? After all, the big books in the Apple world lately, Gil Amelio's On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple and Jim Carlton's Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania and Business Blunders, were both tell-alls about Apple's behind-closed-doors behavior and business practices, and now this new Microsoft book follows suit. Coincidence? It all depends on how paranoid you are...

Speaking of Microsoft "borrowing" from Apple, this latest example is too surreal to be missed. Granted, once again, it's not actually Microsoft doing the borrowing, but it's still too bizarre to ignore. According to O'Grady's PowerPage, on the recent Weekend Edition Sunday broadcast on NPR, Scott Oaky referred to Microsoft's products as "insanely great." (Apparently you can hear this yourself via RealAudio, if you're so inclined.)

Now, any Macophile who doesn't live under a rock knows that the phrase "insanely great" is a Steve Jobs hallmark. Hearing Microsoft's products being referred to in that way is like Luke Skywalker joining the Dark Side of the Force-- it just doesn't logically resolve in the mind. Microsoft's products might be "tolerably bland" or "acceptably adequate," but we have a real problem with them being called "insanely great." Although, based on what little time we've used it, we have to concede that Word 98 comes pretty darn close, bloated as it may be...

Then again, there's always the possibility that access to Jobs' "insanely great" phrase was an unpublicized clause in last August's $150 million Microsoft-Apple deal. In fact, we're even starting to wonder if Bill Gates also got access to Steve's Reality Distortion Field® in that agreement, since Microsoft apologists are actually writing to us about Windows 98's up to 23% performance degradation over Windows 95 and saying that "speed isn't that important." C'mon, Steve, if Bill can persuade people to pay to go slower, surely you can successfully foist a floppyless Mac on the consumer market!

Following Rhapsody's WWDC de-emphasis as the Mac's future (in favor of Mac OS X), questions have arisen as to the fate of Rhapsody for Intel, Apple's next-generation server OS for standard x86-based iron. Remember how Rhapsody for Intel was going to be just like Rhapsody for PowerPC, with the exception of the Blue Box for running Mac OS-based applications? Well, it sounds like all that's going away; Rhapsody for Intel appears to have been deep-sixed. At least, according to Reality, that is...

Now, here's the thing-- after thinking about it, Rhapsody for Intel makes very little sense for Apple right now. Apple still derives the vast majority of its revenue from computer sales, and they've consolidated their entire computer line around the G3 chip. Why would they undermine that by shipping a version of their operating system to run on competing systems? So we're not particularly sorry to see it go. (From a personal standpoint, we're definitely not sorry to see it go, because we've dealt with all of the cheap, shoddy, bargain-basement Wintel equipment we care to work with in this lifetime.)

Remember, just because Rhapsody's not going to be continued on the Intel side doesn't mean that Apple's cross-platform strategy is gone. The Yellow Box runtimes will still exist for Windows, meaning that Rhapsody/Mac OS X applications written with Yellow Box API's (instead of Carbon ones) will be executable on Wintel systems after a simple recompile. Of course, Apple reneged on its original pledge to make the Yellow Box runtime libraries free to distribute, so there's no telling if this strategy will actually catch on with developers, but at least it's a strategy. Hmm.