Finally, Microsoft caves on something! You do, of course, recall the company's attempt to settle a raft of twenty-six California antitrust suits by generously offering to extend its monopoly power into the nation's schools at little to no actual cost to itself, right? And how Steve Jobs publicly called them on it? And how, after listening to Steve, the judge finally struck down the proposal as "thinly-funded" and "constituting court-approved predatory pricing"? You don't? Look, we understand you're concerned about the flesh-eating space locusts, but do try to keep up, okay?

Assuming that you're now all caught up, here's the latest in this ongoing saga: Bloomberg News now reports that Microsoft has altered its settlement proposal "to address Apple's concerns." Instead of getting flooded with free copies of Windows and Office, under the new plan schools would receive vouchers that could be exchanged for "any manufacturer's technology product." Sounds good, right? Almost a little too good. (Pause, narrow eyes, rub chin suspiciously.)

Indeed, if you're the type of person who needs to ascribe a slimy and/or evil motive to every little move Microsoft makes (also known as "the type of person with at least three remaining functioning neurons"), you may want to check out what The Mac Observer has to say about the revised settlement terms. It seems there's some sort of clause limiting the use of the vouchers to either Windows and Office, or software "produced by other companies that compete with and/or have substantially similar functionality to" Windows or Office. The catch might be just who gets to decide what "substantially similar functionality" means; if it's Microsoft, we envision voucher redemption requests getting kicked back with reasoning such as "AppleWorks does not provide substantially similar functionality as Office, because it lacks Clippy," or "Mac OS X does not provide substantially similar functionality as Windows, because it utterly fails to suck."

For Microsoft's part, one of the company's lawyers is quoted as saying that "all along it was our intention that this settlement be platform neutral" just before his pants caught on fire and his nose grew six inches longer-- oh, if only he were a real human boy! So far, according to Bloomberg, "it's not clear if Apple approves of the changes." Apple had originally pressured for the settlement to require the payment of cash, which schools could spend on anything they need, whether that's software, textbooks, or that red sawdust stuff the janitors dump on top of puke. We'll see if Steve takes the bait.

Hey, great news for independent music fans: not only was yesterday's invitation-only meeting of indie label reps at Apple's headquarters not a trap dreamt up by the majors to lure their up-and-coming competitors to a mayonnaisey grave, but it also revealed that Apple is stone cold serious about ensuring that the iTunes Music Store can offer its users a richer selection of tunage than just bland prefab stuff manufactured for maximum consumption. Oh, don't worry-- if you happen to like bland prefab stuff manufactured for maximum consumption, the iTMS will still offer it, so more power to you. But if your tastes are slightly more off-center, you ought to be smiling (and spending) more at the iTMS in maybe six more months or so.

How serious is Apple about signing up the indies? Serious enough to send a reality-distortin' Steve Jobs smack dab into the middle of the 150-rep cluster to prime the pump. That's right, folks; whereas Stevenotes are typically more of a stadium show, those lucky slobs got the Jobsian equivalent of a small club gig-- and judging by one review, at least, the man brought down the house. As faithful viewer newwavedave pointed out to us, the rep from CD Baby took notes at the meeting and appears to be sold, sold, sold.

Even if you have absolutely zippo interest in indie music, it behooves you to check out those notes, because they include a bunch of nifty iTMS stats that, as far as we know, have yet to surface elsewhere. Reportedly the current sales count is at 3.5 million, with approximately half a million songs selling per week; not bad, considering there are only "6-7 million copies of iTunes in use." Over three quarters of the songs offered have sold at least once, and nine out of ten sales are made via One-Click. (Long live the Impulse Buy!) And then there's a whole bunch of interesting stuff about the iTMS from the other side of the transaction. You already know that it's ridiculously easy to buy music from the iTMS, but what it's like to sell it?

Well, apparently, that's pretty darn straightforward, too. Of particular note is the fact that Apple isn't playing any favorites, majors-vs.-indies-wise. Indies are being offered the exact same deal as the Big Five: as Steve puts it, "Same deal. Same agreements. Same team of people. Same treatment, all-around." It costs nothing for a label to add music to the iTMS. Every artist in the store gets artist and album pages, and is listed in New Releases. Apple handles all the merchandising, advertising, credit card transactions, backend infrastructure, etc.; all the labels have to do is encode the music (using a special Mac OS X Music Store Encoder to be released in a few months), enter the song/artist/album info, upload it all, and cash the monthly checks. Oh, and pass some of the cash onto the artists themselves, of course.

Now, we're not record execs, but that all sounds pretty attractive to us. With any luck, then, plenty of these indies will be falling all over themselves to sign on the dotted line. Artists get their work in front of the eyes (er, ears) of a much wider audience than they probably have now, labels get paid, regular shmoes like us get to broaden our horizons at 99 cents a pop, and everybody lived happily ever after.

That is, until the flesh-eating space locusts came.

As usual, we'd like to toss you headlong and screaming into the wilds of your weekend clinging to nothing but a machete, your wits, and a little food for thought. Remember yesterday when we made a throwaway reference to a conspiracy theory involving Microsoft's rumored imminent departure from the Mac platform and the company's recent acquisition of VirtualPC from Connectix? The gist was that Microsoft could essentially asphyxiate the Mac by first cancelling the native Mac versions of its monopoly-mandated business software, and then killing off the most popular means for Macs to run the Windows versions, too. Regardless of your personal opinions about the quality of Microsoft products, you'll probably agree that if Macs can't run Word or Excel, they're not going to have much of a shot in anything remotely resembling the average business environment.

Of course, we were mostly just kidding around-- or so we thought. We tempered our paranoid rantings with an acknowledgment that, even if VirtualPC gets Ballmered into oblivion, at least there are other Wintel emulators in the works. The ones we had in mind were RealPC and SoftWindows, originally by Insignia and now relaunched by FWB. The last we'd heard was that FWB was hard at work on Mac OS X ports and that we could expect to see them soon. But faithful viewer Kevin Hassani tipped us off to a MacNN Forums thread which shows just how deep the conspiracy runs.

It seems that FWB has encountered a mild setback in its plans to modernize and rerelease RealPC and SoftWindows (now called PowerWindows). No, not the flesh-eating space locusts (though those sure aren't helping), but rather a cease and desist letter. From whom, you ask? Why, from a little software outfit hailing from the sunny climes of Redmond, WA. It starts with a "Micro," ends in a "soft," and is run by a howling body-waxed baboon on crack. Three guesses who we're talking about. (No, not Regis.)

The cease and desist is real, folks-- it's confirmed on the PowerWindows page. So, hmmmm, let's see, here... Microsoft buys up one Wintel emulator for the Mac, uses legal maneuvers to attempt to halt the development and release of another, announces that it won't be developing Internet Explorer for our platform anymore, and allegedly considers bailing on the Mac altogether. See? There is something going on here!