So much for the prospect of gutwrenching drama and/or blinding mayhem at yesterday's annual shareholders' meeting, right? We sure are glad we didn't hitchhike cross-country in hopes of witnessing Steve Jobs hurling disgruntled representatives of CalPERS and rampaging hordes of picketing ex-resellers through a plate glass window by sheer force of will, because by all accounts, we would have wound up sorely disappointed. Every indication shows that the meeting was essentially business as usual, which is, of course, good for Apple and the company's stock price, but sort of a letdown for drama hounds like ourselves. Ah, well; maybe next year.

So just how uneventful was the meeting, you ask? Reuters notes that the entire board of directors was reelected with 82% of the votes, which pretty much rendered CalPERS's "throw the bums out" stance purely one of protest-- not that anyone, CalPERS included, had expected different, of course, but it's interesting that everything CalPERS had opposed on a corporate governance basis (the reelection of the board, the retention of KPMG as the company's auditor, and the continued lack of executive pay restrictions) remained at the status quo. And if CalPERS reps were present at the meeting, it's safe to say that none of them raised a ruckus and needed to be silenced by Steve Jobs doing that across-the-room Dark Force Vader Choke thing, unless the press were so intimidated they conspired to ignore it.

Meanwhile, what of that reseller protest outside? Well, folks, it turns out that it consisted of a whopping ten people, and if they succeeded in getting any investors to raise the issue of the apparent retail pricing scandal, it didn't result in enough of an altercation to make the news; the only mention we encountered was this quickie blurb from the same Reuters article: "Asked about the issue by an investor at the meeting, Tim Cook, head of Apple's global operations and sales, said 58 percent of the company's sales go through resellers. 'It is very important to us. I don't see that changing.'" Which, um, says nada about why several thousand invoices collected by the lawsuit-happy resellers who staged the protest appear to show that Apple's own retail stores pay up to hundreds of dollars less for inventory than third-party resellers. Evidently the investors at the meeting didn't feel like pressing the subject.

And when you think about it, really, why would they? These are investors, not just (and possibly not even) Mac fans. They make money when the company makes money-- or more accurately, when AAPL's price goes up. As long as the stock keeps climbing, people at the meeting were probably ultimately just fine with Apple not expensing stock options, or giving its own stores a cherry deal on wholesale merchandise. If Apple had expensed options last quarter, it would have posted a loss; if the allegations of price lowballing are true, then the retail stores would otherwise never have gotten into black ink territory. We're going to go out on a limb and guess that consistent quarterly losses and an unprofitable chain of retail stores aren't the sort of things that typically make stocks go up.

Then again, if there's anything more likely to torpedo a stock price than quarterly losses and unprofitable stores, it's getting caught covering up quarterly losses and unprofitable stores via dodgy accounting practices, so you'd think that even the most mercenary investors would at least want to know that if Apple were being naughty, that it wouldn't get busted for it. Since the income expensing issue is totally public and there are people marching in the streets (well, ten of them, anyway) yelling about the retail pricing thing and the board of directors still hasn't fled the country, we think it's pretty safe to say that everyone's pretty confident in the lack of any serious scandal or intrigue.

Which, again, is great for the stock price-- but man, just once we'd like to hear about Darth Steve going all psychic-medieval on a roomful of malcontents. Nothing against the malcontents, of course, but we'd have enough drama to coast on for a month. Dare to dream.

Say, do you happen to have $25 kicking around? Because, you know, there are a lot of great things available to you when you're accompanied by Andrew "Big 20" Jackson and his buddy Mr. Lincoln. You can, for example, see two or three movies-- at full price. Or, instead, you could sneak into the movie theater and buy a small soda and a box of Raisinets. Or you could buy a SuperDrive eMac. Or, hey, you could almost preorder the entire first season of Wonder Woman on DVD! (Lynda Carter. Rrrrrrowwrrrr.)

What do you mean, "back up to the eMac thing"? Oh, that. Well, okay, you can't really get an eMac for 25 bucks, but that didn't keep several thousand people from trying. Faithful viewer neopod pointed out a Macworld UK article about some Japanese company called "Catena" that accidentally listed the price of eMacs on its web store at Yahoo! Japan as ¥2,787. That's about $25.48 in U.S. dollars, given the exchange rate at broadcast time. Apparently Catena sent Yahoo! the price for a five-pack of DVD-R discs, and Yahoo! somehow wound up posting it as the price of a 1.25 GHz SuperDrive-equipped eMac, which normally sells for ¥115,290 (about $1,053.87). Just a slight difference, there.

Unsurprisingly, Catena says that it pulled in orders from about 20,000 people in less than 24 hours. Somewhat more surprisingly, those 20,000 people placed orders for 100 million eMacs. For the calculatorily-challenged, that's an average of 5,000 eMacs per person. And, sure, it's a great deal and all (albeit an obvious mistake), but even so, were people planning to sell their houses to scrape together the $127,400 they'd need to pay for those things? Yeah, the potential for resale profit was enormous, but that's still a monster outlay of cash. Whatever. The point's moot anyway, since Catena is-- surprise, surprise-- "unable to fulfill the orders." The price was corrected less than a day after the orders started rolling in, and both Catena and Yahoo! have "posted notices on their web sites apologizing for the error."

In a way, we're kinda bummed that the mistake was corrected so quickly. Another twenty minutes or so and we could all have looked forward to articles by Rob Enderle and Paul Thurrott about how, even with a high-end eMac at $25.48, Macs are still too expensive and Apple's going to plummet to its doom any day now. But on the plus side, this little escapade has revealed exactly what Apple needs to do to boost its market share: just lower the eMac's price to 25 clams or so, and in less than a day it'll sell about 130 times more eMacs just in Japan than it sold of all Mac models combined for the entire previous quarter worldwide. Indeed, Macworld notes that if the Catena orders had actually been fulfilled, Apple's market share in Japan would have zoomed up to "90 per cent for the year."

And yeah, sure, there's the little matter of selling 100,000,000 eMacs for several hundred dollars below cost and losing roughly fifteen times its entire cash stockpile in less than a day, but c'mon-- this is market share we're talking about, here! Now there's a recipe for success!

Calm down, folks; we know you just can't enjoy your weekends without your jolly dose of AtAT's traditional Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day, and we're getting to it, we promise. But you really ought to bring up this compulsion at your next therapy session, because we're pretty sure it has something to do with a repressed memory of some awful childhood trauma of some sort. Like maybe your parents left you with your uncle for the day and he took you down into his soundproof basement and made you-- we can barely bring ourselves to say it, here-- use Windows. Or maybe even (choke) DOS. We hope in the name of all that's good and decent that it's not true, but if it is, you really should deal with the issue head-on. The first step to healing is admitting there's a problem. We're here for you, buddy.

Anyway, on to the heaping helping of therapeutic anti-Redmond abuse, which Microsoft has made all too easy this time around. It's true, folks; you don't need us to point out Microsoft's many flaws, because the company has done a pretty thorough job of cataloging them itself. Faithful viewer jkundert notes a CNET article (by way of MacDailyNews) about that "Redmond Justice Goes to Europe" miniseries that's been stretching on for a while now. Apparently the European Commission's 300-page report justifying why it's fining Microsoft €497 million for antitrust violations contains a doozy of an email message to Bill Gates from one of his many minions. Aaron Contorer, who was Microsoft's C++ General Manager in 1997, admitted to Bill at the time that "end users stuck with Windows, despite the operating system's shortcomings, based on the high costs of abandoning heavy investments already made."

Moreover, the guy mentions why third-party software developers keep writing software for Windows. In Aaron's own words, "the Windows API is so broad, so deep and so functional that most ISVs would be crazy not to use it. And it is so deeply embedded in the source code of many Windows apps that there is a huge switching cost to using a different operating system, instead. It is this switching cost that has given the customers the patience to stick with Windows through all our mistakes, our buggy drivers, our high total cost of ownership, our lack of a sexy vision, at times, and many other difficulties. Customers constantly evaluate other desktop platforms but it would be so much work to move over that they hope we just improve Windows rather than force them to move... In short, without this exclusive franchise called the Windows API, we would have been dead a long time ago."

Quite a series of admissions, hmmm? Now, legally, all this email does is provide further evidence that Microsoft does indeed hold monopoly power in the operating system market, which doesn't mean much since that fact has already been proven in court over and over again. From a Microsoft-bashing standpoint, though, it's pure gold. This is the smoking gun, people: a Microsoft exec admitting (albeit seven years ago, but still) that Windows is buggy, expensive, and lame, and that the only reason people stick with it is because they're trapped financially by their existing investment. And that, too, is nothing we didn't already know-- but it's nice to hear Microsoft unwittingly admit it. So here's the question, then: now that it's clear that Microsoft knew how badly it sucked even as it continued to rake in billions of dollars from its long-suffering customers, doesn't that make the company even more evil?

We'll give you a hint: three letters, starts with "Y," rhymes with "mess." And "darn tootin'" is an acceptable alternative.