Hey, anyone want to take a wild guess as to which company just won BrandChannel.com's "Brand of the Year" survey? Bear in mind that this is a largely Apple-themed soap opera you're watching, and we'd need a reason to bring up the topic in the first place. If you need a bigger hint, note that there's a giant green Apple logo dominating the site's home page. Still no idea? Book an appointment with a good neurologist and then allow us to point out that the article describing the outcome is titled "Apple Shines: 2001 Brand of the Year Results." And if you still haven't clued in, well, we're just going to have to declare you legally dead and move on.

Yes, as faithful viewer Shannon informs us, Apple was indeed the official "brand of the year," capturing 14% of the global vote and securing its spot as the one brand that "had the most impact on our lives in 2001." Well, we certainly can't argue with that from a personal perspective, but given the reasonably likely scenario that most people on this planet probably don't spend the majority of their waking hours scribbling down plot twists for an online drama set in the turbulent world of the Macintosh platform, we actually find that result perhaps a little surprising. After all, Apple beat out such heavy-hitting brands as Nokia, Volkswagen, and Starbucks, while Coca-Cola and Nike didn't even make the top five.

Of course, when you look at how these results were determined, perhaps it makes a little more sense. The brands were ranked by-- surprise!-- the readers of BrandChannel.com themselves, and since the site bills itself as "the world's only online exchange about branding," it presumably has a, shall we say, specific audience. Not to put too fine a point on it, BrandChannel.com's demographic is probably comprised heavily of Nokia-chatting, Starbucks-sipping, Absolut-quaffing, Google-searching, Volkswagen-driving Mac users with strong enough ties to the Mac-heavy world of advertising to be frequenting a web site about branding. That doesn't change the fact that Apple's "consistent attention to innovation" deserves this kind of recognition, but it may shed a little light on why, in a world in which fewer than one out of twenty desktop computers is a Mac, the results came out the way they did. But heck, we're sure not going to argue with them.

Hey, does anyone else out there experience a rising core temperature, cold sweats, and a throbbing sensation just behind the left ear every time someone raises the issue of the Mac's feasibility in an enterprise environment? Maybe it's just us; we're perfectly willing to admit that it's not hard to wind up jaded on a subject that just never seems to go anywhere. And this is one dead horse that's been beaten so long, it's got an "I LIKE IKE" button pinned to its mummified carcass.

Still, we're resigned to the fact that people are going to argue this point until either 1) Apple really does become a viable and accepted option in the Big Business workplace, or 2) a killer mutant space virus ravages the entire human race and brings us all the sweet release that only death can offer. Since we're still deliriously optimistic enough to consider scenario 2) far-fetched enough not to concern us much (but not nearly optimistic enough to think that scenario 1) is likely to occur before we're qualifying for the senior citizen discount at the local cineplex), we're pretty much resigned to a life of body temperature fluctuations and head-throbbing.

The latest in this aeons-old saga: Charles Haddad of BusinessWeek notes that Apple has quietly amassed a cadre of programmers in India who are going to focus solely on porting existing UNIX- and Windows-based enterprise software to Mac OS X so that Apple can "break into the serious business applications segment." He takes the historically accurate stance that no matter how much software Apple ports over, the business world at large will never buy Macs as long as they feature "stunning graphics, stylish design, and ease of use," because corporate IT managers physically start to dissolve when they come into contact with such stuff. (It's true. We've seen it happen. It's pretty gross.) About the only thing Mac OS X has over Windows from a hardcore IT perspective is that its kernel panics are basic black, whereas Windows's fatal error screen is a much-too-flashy blue. If Steve really wants to sell Macs to Big Business, making the kernel panics beige (and a lot more frequent) would be a terrific first step.

Meanwhile, Stewart Alsop over at Fortune is offering the other perspective: namely, that the Mac is more likely to attract business buyers now more than ever before. Mac OS X is out, stable, UNIX-based, and geeky enough for the enterprise types to respect at a purely technical level. Internet standards have made a lot of issues surrounding platform choice moot. And while both of those are very good points (especially when combined with Apple's reported push to port business software to the platform), Alsop appears to miss the point: he says that "Macintosh computers have always been and are still fun to use," while he "[doesn't] have fun using Windows-based computers." Mr. Alsop: you have just named the single biggest reason why Macs are never likely to make it into the cube-farms of big business. Fun is Bad. Always remember that.

Don't get us wrong-- we think that Macs are terrific computers for business use. We just also happen to think that the business world at large is never going to admit that fact until every last existing IT manager is rounded up and used as food for Steve's Giant Tiger Pit™. Once that happens, though, look out world!

We here at AtAT are TV junkies, and everyone knows that what TV junkies crave most is Sweeps-- that quarterly monthlong orgy of violence, sexual exploitation, and social irresponsibility all dished up in the name of ratings. Toss in the fact that reruns are virtually forbidden during those glorious days, and we're talking about a couch potato's little slice of heaven on earth. Imagine our dismay, then, when the February Sweeps paradigm got thrown out the window because NBC had the Winter Olympics and FOX had the delayed-from-January Super Bowl. During that holiest of viewing periods, many times we were faced with a choice between sports and "encore presentations" of shows that by all rights should have been airing all-new episodes dripping with sleaze. Dark days, indeed.

So aside from the occasional "Glutton Bowl: The World's Greatest Eating Competition" and "Playmate Fear Factor," February was largely a wipe-out as far as the typical tasteless Sweeps spectacles went. But let us ask you this: did Sweeps get moved forward a month due to the Olympics and nobody bothered to tell us? Because if we had to judge purely by what's happening on "Redmond Justice" (where all hell has just broken loose, dramatically speaking), we've got a solid month of sleaze ahead of us on the tube as all the networks duke it out in a massive tussle for our eyeballs. We just don't want to get our hopes up if we're only going to wind up disappointed.

Here's why we ask: faithful viewer Helen (yes, that Helen) tipped us off to a Salon article about the videotaped deposition of Microsoft veep Jim Allchin, who not only had to contend with "a severe cold," but also had to put up with state lawyers reopening old wounds. When Allchin snufflingly insisted that the separation of Internet Explorer from Windows was impossible ("I couldn't do what you've got there. Forget about any business thing. Technically I just couldn't do it."), the states first got him to admit that Microsoft has done "no studies to see if it could be done," and then dragged out the sledgehammer. They reminded Stuffy Jim that the last time his company introduced evidence to prove that Windows "could be damaged" if IE were removed, it soon became clear that Microsoft's videotaped demo of the ensuing carnage and desolation was faker than the cleavage on the aforementioned Playmate episode of "Fear Factor." "Do you have any expectation as to whether or not you will be putting together a similar demonstration for this part of the case?" asked the lawyers. Jim's response: "Not exactly like that one." That's ratings gold, baby!

But wait, that's not all: Allchin also "admitted to lawyers for the states that Microsoft violated the law but refused to specify the violations" because, and we quote, he says he's "not an attorney." When the lawyers asked him whether it might be important to know what violations were committed in order to avoid repeating them, Allchin's response was reportedly, "Well, it's a very complicated area. Very complicated." Oh, Jim, Jim, Jim... where was your deposition in February, when we needed it?

Meanwhile, The Register says that, for his deposition, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has traded in his usual "rampaging ape" overblown theatrics for some far more court-suitable "quietly-agonized" overblown theatrics. Reportedly Ballmer appears as a "beaten little bald man with hollow eyes bravely fighting back the tears"-- and then goes and blows it all by claiming that the states' sanctions would require Microsoft to create "thousands to millions of additional versions" of Windows. A tip for future performances, Steve: try not to go over the top. It's all too easy to lose the audience's sympathy by taking it one step over the line. Heck, just take a look at how newly-returning states' lawyer Stephen Houck (hey, it's no "Return of Smilin' Dave Boies," but it still smacks of a ratings grab) has been squaring off against old Redmond rival Steven Holley, as described by the Associated Press. They started off sniping at each other in classic soap opera fashion ("I find your presence here bizarre, frankly," said Holley) and eventually devolved into what sounds like the litigational equivalent of a full-blown hair-pulling contest. Are they auditioning for roles on "Ally McBeal"?

So yeah, you can perhaps understand our confusion as to whether Sweeps just got pushed forward and we're sitting smack in the middle of ratings-boosting hijinks. And heck, even if this isn't a postponed Sweeps, between the circus known as "Redmond Justice" and getting to watch Greg Brady pound the tar out of Danny Partridge on Celebrity Boxing, well, we guess this makes up for the February upheaval just fine.