Hey, remember back in 1997 when Apple signed that contract in blood at midnight by a crossroads where a virtuous man was murdered? Well, actually, we're mostly just guessing about the specific circumstances of the formal agreement, but by Apple's own admission, it did make a pact with Microsoft-- a pact that gave a lot of us Mac fans a serious case of the willies. So it's kinda hard not to imagine Bill Gates having been present with horns, a pointy tail, and a golden fiddle straight out of an early '80s crossover country hit. (Tacky? Maybe. But just because he's the ultimate personification of evil, that doesn't mean it's easy for him to accessorize. "Hey, Melinda, does this pitchfork make my butt look big?")

Setting aside for a moment the burning issue of Bill's diabolical accoutrements, basically, here's what happened: Apple agreed to drop its patent infringement claims against Redmond and switch to Internet Explorer from Netscape, while Microsoft agreed to invest $150 million in Apple stock and promised that Office would stay on the Mac platform for five more years. Well, a quick glance at a CNET article pointed out to us by faithful viewer Alex Gunkel (or, alternatively, a quick thumbing through the wiener puppy calendar on the wall in the kitchen) reminds us that the clock's a-tickin' on those five years of guaranteed Officeness. To be precise, once August rolls around, Microsoft has the option of taking its Big Ball O' Bloatware™ and going home.

Apple, for its part, claims not to be worried, because it and Microsoft are now so chummy; Phil Schiller, for instance, states that "it's not an issue today, a contracted commitment between Apple and [Microsoft's] Macintosh Business Unit for the future of Office products. They have shown us in many ways their commitment to the Mac." Microsoft's Kevin Browne concurs; the two companies are much more buddy-buddy today than they were in 1997, and so "Microsoft and Apple have not talked about doing any formal renewal of the agreement." Indeed, we doubt there's much to worry about, since Microsoft certainly didn't amass its hoard of filthy lucre by cancelling profitable products-- and Mac versions of Office are profitable indeed. We've also long suspected that there's a sort of unspoken understanding between Cupertino and Redmond: Apple carves out a healthy niche that stays nicely at or below a 10% market share level, and Microsoft supports the unthreatening Mac platform as a convenient hedge against further antitrust ickiness with the Justice Department. So we're incurable cynics. Sue us.

But CNET raises some interesting points about the Apple-Microsoft relationship not being all penny whistles and moon pies. While Steve refused to get on the stand and testify against Microsoft during the "Redmond Justice" trials (he wisely sent Avie Tevanian instead), His Steveness did recently make a big public stink about Microsoft's proposed antitrust settlement that would flood the nation's poorest schools with Windows; soon after, the proposal was shot down. And let's not forget the rumors that Steve himself initiated and funded "Redmond Justice" in the first place. We have to imagine there's a lot of acrimony on both sides swimming around just under the surface; how deep it runs may determine what happens to the Mac version of Office once this summer winds to a close. And maybe it's just the cynicism talking, but when it comes to an agreement with Microsoft, we'd much rather have a signed contract than a smile and an "understanding."

We've been hearing whispers about honest-to-goodness server Macs for the better part of a year, now, and we've still got zilch to show for it; Apple's idea of a server is still just a regular desktop Power Mac with a hefty chunk of extra software on the hard drive. In other words, we're talking no redundant hot-swappable disks, no redundant hot-swappable power supplies, no rack-mount-friendly enclosures, and a whole host of features that are pretty close to useless in a box that's generally going to be running unattended in a closet somewhere. Really, who needs a RADEON with 32 MB of DDR RAM in a server that would ideally be run without a display most of the time anyway?

So, desktops with software bundles-- that's where we are now, and that's where we've been for ages, probably ever since Apple junked those mammoth Apple Network Servers that ran AIX, IBM's flavor of UNIX. We'd always had a feeling that Apple probably wouldn't get serious about servers again until 1) Mac OS X had hit its stride, and 2) the company was ready to tackle the enterprise market with a vengeance. After all, who else but big business IT geeks would get all hot and bothered about relatively drab rectangular slabs designed to be bolted into a metal rack?

Answer: why, hardcore bioscience nerds, of course! Faithful viewer gumby tipped us off to a WIRED article which describes how genetics researcher Patrick Gavin, like others in his field, is clustering dozens of what amount to individual desktop-class personal computers into a massively parallel (and, relatively speaking, dirt cheap) supercomputer for the sole purpose of crunching DNA data. And he'd love to use Macs, because "the PowerPC architecture is vastly superior to anything else out there in terms of power consumption versus processing power." The problem is that Power Macs are simply entirely the wrong shape; they aren't really stackable and they take up too much space if you're looking to cram eighty of them into a room-- let alone several hundred. So, no Mac cluster for Patrick.

Now, while Apple has been extremely reluctant to go paddling into the enterprise waters where Dell reigns supreme, it's no secret that Cupertino has been courting the science market pretty heavily for a while, particularly in the area of genetics research. Between Art Levinson of Genentech joining Apple's board of directors, a distinct pitch of the UNIXy power of Mac OS X in science circles, and the recent release of Apple's improved version of the bioinformatics tool BLAST, clearly this is a market that Apple wants to own. Since that market apparently wants "a scalable, high-density hardware solution," hey, maybe we'll see some specialized clusterable Mac servers sooner rather than later. And that'd be good for us here at AtAT, too-- because while we're about as interested in mapping the human genome as we are in ironing our socks, we wouldn't mind serving AtAT from a svelte little rack guy someday.

As you well know, we tend to go on and on (and on and on and on and on) about Michael Dell's increasingly obvious obsession with Steve Jobs and the man's many transparent attempts to duplicate His Steveness's strategies and accomplishments. But as far as we know, at least ol' Madman Mike has never gone so far as to dress up like Steve during a keynote address. (Yet.) Now, Bill Gates, on the other hand... well, let's just say that his own copycat antics must have Mikey fearing for his reputation as the Ultimate Steve Wannabe.

Bill copying Steve isn't exactly anything new, either, as we've mentioned in the past. The theme of one Gatesian keynote address from last year was so noticeably similar to Steve's "the PC is not dead / digital hub" spiel from three weeks prior, we cheekily wondered of Bill in the scene's title, "did he wear a turtleneck?" Well, thanks to faithful viewer Hari Punz, once more we get to witness life imitating sarcasm-- with horrifying consequences. See, Hari pointed us towards a German FutureZone article about Mr. Gates's Xbox unveiling in Japan, and, well, you can pretty much guess the rest.

Our single year of high school German is woefully inadequate in this situation, and the Babelfish translation, while hilarious in its own right, isn't much help either. But there are a couple of photos which clearly reveal that Bill Gates is definitely, undeniably, and unabashedly wearing a black turtleneck ("Rollkragenpuli") as he addresses the crowd. A publicity photo of Steve in his usual keynote attire is provided for reference, and the similarity is both staggering and not just a little scary.

Interestingly enough, while black is supposed to be slimming, Bill's "wealth antinode bulge" is strangely accentuated-- or, as Hari kindly rendered intelligible, Bill's gut is hanging out in a big way. Clearly this is not a good look for him-- but let's be a little charitable, lest we forget that Steve himself delivered his last Tokyo keynote in a suit. There must be something in the water over there that makes tech celebrities dress differently, or something. In closing, the article opines that "at this point Gates should not obviously differently than its fashionable model job plug, but schlabbern leave leave." They took the words right out of our mouths.