So as far as Steve Jobs' keynote addresses go, this last one at Macworld Expo Tokyo wasn't particularly memorable-- or perhaps we should say that it's one that Jobs (and the rest of us) will be trying hard to forget. First of all, there weren't any crazy new surprises: no information about the consumer portable, no surprise introduction of the upcoming "101" PowerBooks, still no formal unveiling of QuickTime 4, etc. For Apple watchers, a Jobs keynote without any surprises might as well be handled entirely by worldwide marketing dude Phil "Second Banana" Schiller. But what really made this keynote a downer were the repeated hardware and software failures during the demonstrations. After all, we bet that Bill Gates still has nightmares about the USB-related crash during his Windows 98 demo at Comdex a while back, though in his dreams the crash is probably followed by a long fall onto a big pile of tens and twenties. Jobs, on the other hand, doesn't have fifty billion reasons to feel better, and we suspect that he has higher expectations and standards than Mr. Bill. We wouldn't be surprised if his public humiliation leaves a trail of pink slips in its wake.

According to a MacWEEK article, the first crash happened during Ben Waldman's demonstration of Japanese-localized versions of Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Waldman, as faithful viewers will recall, is Microsoft's Macintosh Business Unit manager, and he's trotted out on stage at damn near every single keynote as the Token Microsoft Mac Guy to smile broadly, crack wan jokes, and impress us all with how Mac-friendly the Redmond Giant has become. (Of course, email by Waldman suggesting that Microsoft threaten to cancel development of Office for the Mac unless Internet Explorer became the default browser in the Mac OS has been entered into evidence in the "Redmond Justice" trial, but that's a different story altogether.) Anyway, his demo crashed, at which point Waldman blamed the hardware and said that "one of the greatest things about the new G3 is the reset switch on the front." Mmmm, there's a guy Apple wants on its side, right?

As if that weren't bad enough, Jobs returned to the stage only to have his own demo fail. Jobs was "visibly angry" when the fabulous Wall of iMacs™ failed to display streaming video from a G3 running Mac OS X Server. (Alert viewers will recall that this exact demo went off without a hitch at last month's Expo in San Francisco.) "What is going on, I have no idea," said Jobs. "It didn't work as I planned." At that point, Cranky Steve thanked the crowd and walked off the stage-- after which, the demo started working properly. All in all, not a shining moment for Jobs or Apple. We'll forgo our predictable musings about corporate sabotage and the like and just take a moment of silence for the poor ex-Apple employees who just got it in the neck...

So were you one of the brave souls so firmly secure in your role as "Consumer Dude" that you signed up for a free iMac from One Stop Communications? You remember this deal, right? People who agree to spend at least $100 a month for 36 months at One Stop's online mall get a free iMac. Of course, it's a little more complex than that; you actually have to spend at least $25 in each of at least four stores, and you also have to use One Stop's Internet service, priced at $19.95 a month. That means that you would have to commit to spending an absolute minimum of $4318.20 over the course of three years in order to get your "free" iMac. Sounds kinda scary to us. And it gets even scarier once you read about the company offering the deal.

Katie, AtAT's Goddess of Minutiae, noticed an article over at Wired that casts a pretty serious pall of doubt on the whole venture. One Stop's CEO, Israel Rosenfeld, apparently tried a similar promotion last year through a completely different company, when he offered customers free ISDN Internet access if they spent $100 each month in an online mall. Several customers paid their first month's money and never got their ISDN service-- the company went bankrupt and the money was never returned. Add to that questionable past the fact that the online mall for the iMac offer doesn't yet exist-- Rosenfeld claims that his webmaster is "caught up in some storms" in Chicago. Then consider the fact that Rosenfeld claims that One Stop's biggest venture, a massive global high-bandwidth network called Studio 2000, is "secured against loss by a $600 million guarantee from... a subsidiary of the London Guarantee Insurance Company," when in fact the LGIG says that's patently untrue.

Worried yet? Sure, Rosenfeld's reportedly revamping the iMac program to include "no advancement payment," but is that really enough to earn customers' trust? And is it just us, or is anyone else a little concerned about the fact that One Stop won't accept credit card payments, instead billing by checks only? If this whole thing fails to materialize, we'll be sorry for everyone caught in the collapse-- including Apple. Seeing as One Stop's stated plan was to provide 25,000 free iMacs to its customers, Apple would be losing a sizeable chunk of potential sales income if it's all just a scam. We figure, why take the risk? You can have an iMac in the color of your choice for a mere $28 a month via Apple's consumer loan; or better yet, you can put that $1199 on a credit card and pay it off early, saving yourself a chunk of interest. Think before you jump.

When last we checked in on "Redmond Justice," we stated that what started out as funny had just become sad and pathetic. We were referring to the way in which every time Microsoft introduced some new videotaped evidence, government lawyers found some way to show it as being somehow questionable. First there was the tape of the "de-Internet-Explorerized" Windows 98 taking a very long time to access the Internet-- which government lawyer David Boies pointed out must have used footage of multiple computers spliced together. Microsoft was forced to admit that the take was an "illustration" and not an actual test. Then Microsoft introduced a tape showing that Windows 98 lets a user sign up for an Internet service provider much more quickly than Windows 3.1 does. Boies got them to admit that the Windows 3.1 computer had a slower modem than the Windows 98 machine, rendering that test suspect as well. And Microsoft's latest video evidence reveals how easy it is for a Windows 98 user to download and install a competing browser, such as Netscape Navigator. Unfortunately, once again Boies claimed that Microsoft had stacked the deck in their own favor, using a high-speed Internet connection that few real customers would have. He also accused them of editing out several important steps in the process.

Are you up to speed now? Good. So now the latest installment of our favorite courtroom drama reveals that Microsoft veep Brad Chase admits that the last tape was, in fact, an inaccurate portrayal of the downloading and installation process for Netscape Navigator. According to a CNET article, the Department of Justice prepared their own video, showing what it's really like to download and install another browser-- and it took "between 30 minutes and an hour." It also included several steps that weren't shown in Microsoft's tape, such as manually putting a shortcut icon of Navigator on the Windows desktop. Last week, Chase claimed that the icon would magically appear once the download was completed, but now he admits that he was wrong. Chase agrees that the government's tape "accurately portrayed" the process that Microsoft's demonstration showed as overly easy.

We are now firmly convinced that Microsoft is trying to lose this case. There have been far too many "blunders" since the whole thing began; Microsoft's lawyers are reportedly among the best in the business (well, okay, make that the best paid in the business) and yet their defense could only have been crafted by the third-generation idiot mutant inbred offspring of the Three Stooges and the Twiddle Bugs that live in Ernie's flowerbox on Sesame Street. So what's the deal? We have to assume that Bill Gates is trying to get Microsoft broken up into "Baby Bills," which likely wouldn't do a thing to affect the Windows monopoly, but would almost certainly make Mr. Gates even more money than he has now. Heck, if it worked for Rockefeller and Standard Oil in 1911...