So of course you know by now that the rumors were, in fact, correct. Early in the week, shadowy sources claiming to have "acquired" a final draft of the script for last Friday's "Redmond Justice" episode reported that, contrary to popular belief, the Justice Department would ask the court to split Microsoft up the middle. A few days later, anonymous fans who had managed to sneak onto the set during the shoot claimed that the script had undergone drastic last-minute rewrites, and that when the show would air, instead of filing their own separate proposal, the nineteen states still in the case (formerly opposed to any sort of breakup) would unilaterally back the DoJ's plan.

Well, as first reported by faithful viewer Jonathan Signor, when the show hit the airwaves last Friday, those rumors turned out to be dead-on accurate. (Don't you wish the world of Apple rumors had that kind of percentage? Can we get those sources into Cupertino?) If you missed the episode, the Washington Post has an excellent write-up that captures most of the action-- heck, they've even got a full seventeen-page transcript if that's the kind of thing that floats your boat. Basically, the plan calls for Microsoft to be split into two Baby Bills (or Babysofts, or Microchunks, or whatever you want to call them). One would handle nothing but operating systems, which ought to keep it plenty busy; Microsoft's currently got Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows CE (uh, we mean "Pocket PC") on the shelves, with Windows ME on deck. The other company would crank out applications, like Office and Internet Explorer, and would also encompass services like MSN. Sounds like the show's producers are gearing up for a bevy of entertaining "Redmond Justice" spinoffs...

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft is expressing outrage and dismay. For a break from the gritty courtroom drama, take a quick gander at Microsoft's official response to the government's breakup recommendation-- a little comic relief will help take the edge off. Bill's PR flunkies refer to the plan as an "unprecedented regulatory scheme" (we'd comment, but we're too busy choosing a long-distance phone service), and Bill himself chimes in with this little gem: "Microsoft never could have created Windows and Office in they were in separate companies." Evidently since the corporation lost its court case, it no longer sees any need to keep claiming that Microsoft held no advantage in writing office productivity software by having sole access to the operating system's guts. And of course there's the predictable yet comfortable bleating of the "I" word: "Dismantling Microsoft would hurt the company's ability to continue to innovate, and that would hurt consumers." At the risk of losing this show's G rating, all we can say is, hurt me, baby-- hurt me good.

Meanwhile, tensions are running high in a long-standing conflict elsewhere in the industry: FireWire vs. USB 2.0. FireWire's been around for a long time, now, and yet it hasn't exactly been embraced by the industry with warm smiles and friendly hugs. The only major computers on the market that currently ship with FireWire built-in are most Macs, a lot of Sony systems, and a couple of Dells-- and when it's present, FireWire is touted almost exclusively as a digital video interface instead of a versatile peripheral bus whose 400 Mbps makes even most flavors of SCSI look pokey by comparison.

Now, long-time followers of this particular subplot will recall that the early opposition to FireWire was due largely to Apple's exorbitant licensing scheme. See, Apple invented FireWire, and originally it was widely reported that manufacturers would have to pay a dollar per port to include the technology on their equipment. A buck a port may not sound like a lot to you, Rockefeller, but in the razor-thin-margin world of PC manufacturing, you can bet that an extra couple of clams wasn't winning any friends. Eventually Apple slashed the price to twenty-five cents per system, but by then the industry was already firing back-- by supporting Intel's upcoming USB 2.0 specification. USB, which really only caught on when Apple made it the sole peripheral expansion bus in the wildly popular iMac, only moves data at 12 Mbps, which isn't exactly optimal for bandwidth-hungry devices like hard drives. So Intel's next revision to USB is going to increase its speed forty-fold; at 480 Mbps, it's supposedly going to surpass FireWire, thus rendering Apple's technology unnecessary.

Now, never mind the fact that FireWire's here now, it already works with dozens of peripherals, it connects directly to digital camcorders, and it'll be up to 800 Mbps by the time USB 2.0 ever sees the light of day. (For an excellent overview of why FireWire's still better than USB 2.0, we heartily recommend David Every's article at MacKiDo.) The reason we're bringing this back up now is because Intel has only just finally released the completed specification for its pretender to the high-speed throne, and The Register reports that Microsoft's jumping in on the FUD wagon. Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt are collectively the single best weapon that the rest of the industry has ever had against Apple, and judging by Microsoft's latest comments on FireWire, it's a weapon that's still in heavy use today.

Carl Stork, general manager of the company's Windows hardware strategy group, was quoted in EE Times as saying that "some of the control protocols and content protection technologies still have undefined intellectual property regimes that make [secure FireWire links] a challenge." Loosely translated, Stork's saying "hey, manufacturers... don't use FireWire, because I'm using some scary technojargon that ought to impress you and scare you simultaneously." As it turns out, though, these "content protection technologies" of which Stork speaks aren't specific to FireWire at all-- and, in fact, since they "relate secure transmission of data across any bus," they may relate to USB 2.0 as well. But it's good to see that Microsoft's current legal fracas hasn't got it so worked up that it can't take the occasional potshot at the competition...

Oh, thank heaven-- there we were, wistfully wiping away a tear as we bade the era of "beleaguered Apple" a bittersweet farewell, when a faithful viewer told us we didn't have to say goodbye just yet. See, we figured that Apple had hit the official ceiling of rational skepticism (and even of irrational skepticism) with its fourteenth-or-whatever straight Street-beating profitable quarter, sustained year-on-year unit and revenue growth, and skyrocketing stock price. After all that, we thought, how could anyone not in a rubber room and on a strict diet of antipsychotic drugs possibly still see Apple as being in danger of collapse? And so, despite how good Apple's red ink had been to our little drama in the past, we were locking the "financial strife" plot twists away in cold storage for the time being.

That's when Bob McLennan told us not to retire the "beleaguered" plot device just yet. Have you read Robert Morgan's latest RFI Report, which analyzes Apple's most recent quarterly financial love-fest? As one would expect, Morgan doesn't find anything particularly wrong with Apple's money status-- but one of his readers does. In fact, this gentleman outright calls Apple's recovery a "sham," claiming that Apple's recent revenue growth somehow arose from "selling investments and engaging in the kind of balance sheet slights [sic] of hand that is always the sign of a struggling company." He doesn't use the "B" word directly, but we'll just chalk that up to an obvious lapse in medication.

Now, given that the gentleman in question is obviously functional enough to use a web browser, it appears that we were wrong-- there are people roaming loose in society who actually think Apple's still in dire financial straits. Therefore, we can still hold out hope that in the not-too-distant future, we'll once again get to wallow in the depraved, guilty pleasures of "red ink" drama as we crank out AtAT scripts. Heck, if even just one raving loony out there is entertained by it, we'll have considered it a job well done. Of course, it'll be a little tough to spin "growth that outpaces the growth of the computer industry as a whole" into some kind of doom-and-gloom plot twist, but heck, we love a challenge!