There's still more on the unholy mess that is next summer's Macworld Expo, and the word isn't good-- at least, not for those of you who look forward to the annual East Coast version of the show. Just yesterday we noted that Jim Rooney of the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority "expressed doubt" that the show would happen anywhere next summer, be it Boston or New York, and an AppleInsider source allegedly put the chance of the show taking place at all at only about 60%.

"So what?" you say; "them's better than even odds, so why so glum, chum?" Well, we admit that your optimism is infectious and only slightly nauseating, but we feel compelled to remind you that IDG top dog David Korse has flat-out declared that if the show comes together next summer, there's a 100% chance that it won't be Macworld Expo-- it'll be CreativePro. And before you start yammering on about how last month's Stevenoteless, now-with-40%-less-Apple Macworld CreativePro was at least better than nothing, we should clarify something: Korse isn't talking about another "Macworld CreativePro," he's talking about just "CreativePro." In his own words, "Macworld is only going to happen once a year, in California."

For a better understanding of the implications of the missing "Macworld" tag from CreativePro's title, take a gander at Think Secret, which reports that 1) "the chances this show will happen in Boston are all but gone" (meaning, "less than 10 percent"), and 2) whether or not there's a show at all "depends on getting Windows products to exhibit," because reportedly there's a "change in the show's direction to get more Windows users as attendees." In other words, any vague resemblance between next summer's maybe-show and the Mac mecca of years past would be entirely coincidental. So if you've still got your fingers crossed for that 60% chance of a CreativePro being slapped together for next July, be aware of just what it is you're wishing for: the opportunity to spend a ton of money to go hang out with Wintel users and look at a slew of products you can't use. (Okay, fine, that's an exaggeration-- and CreativePro might still be a worthwhile gig for actual "creative pros," but if you're looking for a gathering of Mac fanatics from all walks of life congregating to worship at the feet of Jobs, you're going to have to wait for San Francisco in January.)

So IDG's trying to take the show cross-platform in hopes of pulling in some of that sweet, sweet Wintel cash, hmmmm? Well, we'll see how that works out for them, but we can't help be reminded of Apple Expo 98, the UK show from which Apple bailed when the organizers wanted to replace it with a cross-platform event. Eventually Apple Expo went ahead without Apple, and the show's organizers ran a second show-- Total Design Technology, cross-platform and targeted at designers-- concurrently in the same hall. Both shows flopped. Food for thought.

Barring any startling developments (say, the return of a heavily-armed Charlie Greco with David Korse's head on a stick), we'll be leaving this subject until IDG's official excuse decision on September 1st. For now, though, things seem pretty clear: the Boston-or-New York thing is totally irrelevant anyway, because regardless, the summer Macworld Expo is apparently dead and gone. Things are still up in the air, of course, but right now this is really starting to look like one of those times when it sucks to be right.

Well, it's not like no one saw it coming, but somehow it still came as a mild shock: MacFixIt reported yesterday that Connectix, that longtime Mac developer who brought us such groundbreaking titles as RAM Doubler, Virtual Game Station, and, of course, Virtual PC, has "closed down the customer service section of its web site" and its forums. Why? Because Virtual PC was its final remaining product that hadn't been sold off or discontinued, and Microsoft snapped that one up earlier this year. So what's left of Connectix, you ask? Well, that's a darn good question, Miffy; everything we'd seen before implied that Microsoft bought Virtual PC and not Connectix itself, but the newly-closed support section states otherwise: "With the Microsoft acquisition of Connectix, effective August 6th, 2003, Microsoft will provide technical support on supported versions of Virtual PC."

So unless that statement is way off base, apparently what we've got here is, indeed, another full-fledged sellout to the Borg. And yet, despite the fact that we here at AtAT have bought at least one copy of just about every product Connectix has ever shipped, somehow we don't take this nearly as personally as the Great Bungie Defection of 2000-- possibly because we never baked Connectix cookies as a thank-you for continuing to support the Mac platform. And before you go blaming Connectix's sellout on our failure to bring the company a piping-hot tray of Toll Housey goodness, may we remind you that Bungie sold out, too, despite having wolfed down a batch of fresh sweet eats from our ever-lovin' oven. Contrary to what we believed in our foolish youth, baked goods evidently can't solve all the world's problems.

The good news, however, is that, unlike Halo ("any minute now, we swear"), Virtual PC for the Mac is immediately available as a supported Microsoft product-- for now, anyway. If you own a copy of 6.0, you can even download an update to 6.1, which reportedly doesn't really do a whole heckuva lot except slap Microsoft logos all over the place, but Microsoft claims that it will allow you to "seamlessly transition product support to Microsoft" and offer you "the chance to receive future updates and new bug fixes." And now that it's a Microsoft product, chances are decent that you're gonna need those bug fixes. Often.

If you don't already own Virtual PC and for some bizarre reason you want to defile your Mac with an x86 operating system, the good news is that now there are two ways to get it. You can either purchase a standalone version ($129 for the virtual machine alone, $219 to $249 for a copy with a version of Windows-- gee, where's the Linux version?), or you can get it bundled into the newly-announced Office v. X for Mac Professional Edition, which is basically the same version of Office that was available yesterday, only with Virtual PC thrown in for "free." (If you just want Office, there's some good news on that front, too-- now the "Standard Edition" is a hundred bucks cheaper at $399, and the "Student and Teacher Edition" is just $149.)

Now, we make no secret of the fact that our paranoia of all things Microsoft goes way beyond rational thought, but does anyone else get a little edgy about the inclusion of Virtual PC with Office? Sure, our rational selves (yes, we have them; they're just really, really small) think this is terrific; corporate Mac users get native versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint (plus Entourage, with its increasing support for Exchange Server) together with a Wintel emulator to run any corporate apps that may not exist for the Mac. Sounds like a very positive package for Mac fans at work, right? But the raging paranoiacs within us can't help pairing this news up with the unconfirmed murmurs about Microsoft planning to cancel Mac Office development entirely; what if, in the future, Office v. X for the Mac winds up being Virtual PC bundled with the Windows version of Office? Eeeyyeeeewwww.

Speaking of Microsoft, faithful viewer Matt informs us that the company is in some serious trouble now: according to the Associated Press, a jury has awarded plaintiffs Eolas and the University of California $520 million in damages after determining that Microsoft infringed on their patent when it shipped Internet Explorer. To get a sense of just how much money that is, you're going to have to put it in perspective with amounts you come into contact with every day, so first, picture a half a billion dollars. Got it? Okay, now add another $20 million to the pile. And now you're saying, "Gee, it's so much clearer now-- that's one big heap of cash!"

Keep in mind that this ruling doesn't necessarily mean squat; remember, a court once ordered Microsoft to be cleft in twain, and after the appeals process that somehow got talked down to a pony ride and a free Dove bar. But if Microsoft should lose its appeal (as if it ever had any in the first place-- har de har), then yes, the company will have to fork over slightly more than a half-billion dollars because it never licensed a patent that apparently covers "the embedding of small interactive programs such as 'plug-ins' or 'applets' into World Wide Web documents." We're not going to comment on whether or not we think that patent should be valid in the first place, in part because if we ever publicly agreed with Microsoft on anything, our eyes would explode and we just shampooed the carpets, but it sounds to us like anyone else making browsers that support the QuickTime or Flash plug-ins and/or Java should start running now. (Apple: wanna hide in our basement? It's paneled!)

As for where the $520 million figure came from, apparently the jury decided that $1.47 per unit constituted "reasonable royalties," and Microsoft has reportedly shipped 354 million copies of Windows (IE's nothing but an integrated part of Windows, ya know) from the time the patent was granted in late '98 until the suit was filed in the summer of '01. Hoo-weee. But don't feel too badly for Microsoft, folks; at last count, the company had $49 billion sitting around, up almost 27% from the $38.7 billion it had last year. By our calculations, that means Microsoft can lose roughly twenty of these half-billion-dollar lawsuits a year and still never actually lose any ground. No wonder the company is so brazen about breaking laws and violating patents-- who needs ethics when you've got huge wads of cash?