Listen! Hear that bell? That means the gloves are off and the real fight begins now. BuyMusic.com, Rhapsody, WalMart, even Napster were all lightweights in the tussle for digital music market share; molest us not with this pocket calculator stuff. But now the iTunes Music Store finally has some real competition, because last night Microsoft took the wraps off its own iTMS clone. Ladies and gentlemen, cower in fear before the Microsoft Online Music Store, otherwise known as... MOMS.

Well, okay, technically Microsoft appears just to be calling it "MSN Music," but MOMS is being tossed around as a far less bland alternative in the MacRumors Forums, and we're hoping it sticks-- the service is still a beta (er, "preview"), after all. Whatever the name turns out to be when the real service launches in October, though, you just have to admire the sheer nerve it takes for Microsoft to pretend that MOMS has nothing whatsoever to do with the iTMS; MSN's corporate veep actually denied to the Seattle Times that MOMS was a reaction to Apple's music download service, saying: "We definitely would have done this on our own. We were on a path already to provide great music services and so the Apple effort didn't really change what we would have done." So it's a complete and total coincidence that, like the iTMS, MOMS has 99-cent songs, $9.99 albums, free song previews, single-click purchasing, and (soon) a catalog of over one million songs. And, as faithful viewer loa bacon points out, "New Music Tuesdays." Nope, MOMS clearly wasn't influenced by the iTMS in any way at all.

Indeed, how could it have been, since the iTMS apparently never existed in the first place? Faithful viewer Miche Doherty notes a CBS MarketWatch article (found via MacMinute) in which the same MSN veep announces that Microsoft's goal with MOMS is "to finally bring digital music to the masses by offering what we believe is the largest and highest quality catalog of legal music on the Internet." Oh, thank heaven somebody's doing that! And what a stroke of luck for us all that it's the Grand Innovator of Redmond.

Seriously, to the masses? Which masses do you suppose this joker's talking about? Because when last we checked, Windows users could use iTunes just fine, and in fact since MOMS isn't Mac-compatible (big shock, we know) or even available for use in any browser other than Internet Explorer 5.01 or later for Windows, it sounds to us like Apple's got the service for "the masses," relatively speaking. Maybe by "masses" the veep meant the majority of users with portable music players, since he was careful to note that the MOMS catalog is "available on the broadest selection of portable devices." Except that while MOMS downloads are allegedly compatible with 70-odd players on the market, they aren't playable on the iPod-- which is in the hands of the more people out there than those other 70 players combined. "To the masses" indeed.

By the way, isn't it fun hearing Microsoft whine about the iPod and "consumer choice" to its customers just like Real does-- especially when its service, like Real's, isn't even Mac-compatible? Faithful viewer Jonathan notes that Microsoft originally even instructed its customers to burn CDs of MOMS songs and then re-rip them into iTunes in order to transfer the music to an iPod; that advice has since been removed, either because Microsoft realized that it was advising its customers to violate its own terms of service or because it realized that there aren't many people stupid enough to jump through those hoops instead of just buying their music through iTunes in the first place.

Anyway, we can't test MOMS itself, not being Windows-enabled (yes, cry for us why don't you); we can only look at it and note that it strikes us as a pared-down iTMS clone run backwards through a tree-shredder and then painted with two coats of Sherwin-Williams SuperPaint Interior flat latex in shade #3442, "Ugly and In Denial." But faithful viewer Brett Chaffer pointed us toward a fairly extensive review over at Mac360 which manages to give us a headache just by describing the setup process. Apparently just getting the store running in the first place requires downloading and installing an ActiveX control in addition to the Windows Media Player 10 Technical Beta, because as of yet MOMS runs in IE and passes downloaded songs off to WMP, which all sounds about as cumbersome and irritating as we'd expect a Microsoft product or service to be. And for all that, all you get is a way to search for songs and buy them-- MOMS currently lacks all of the frills that make the iTMS such a joy, like gift certificates, celebrity playlists, free downloads, music videos, customer iMixes, etc. Heck, from what we can tell, there isn't even a "Browse" mode.

In other words, based solely on its reported merits (what few there are), we'd never in a million years consider MOMS to be a viable threat to the iTMS's market position; unfortunately, MOMS is a Microsoft service, which means that as long as fewer than 12% of the population actually die from using it, it's good enough to survive by monopoly power alone. Remember, now that Windows XP Service Pack 2 has turned Auto-Update on by default, at some point in October, gazillions of Windows users will awake to find that they've been upgraded to Windows Media Player 10 overnight-- with a handy reminder to give MOMS a whirl, no doubt. iTunes may be preloaded on every Compaq and Hewlett-Packard consumer PC sold, but it's still not going to have the built-in automatic captive audience of MOMS, which the vast majority of Windows users will probably default to using "because it's there."

Consider this: if you think Internet Explorer sucks now, we're telling you it was practically lethal until version 4, and yet it has something like 90ish percent of the market. Are we about to witness a repeat performance? You bet-- maybe not right away, but maybe in a couple of years unless Apple keeps on its toes. Ah, the Wintel Market: Where Half-Assed Is Good Enough™.

Look out, Regular Shmoes; Macs aren't just for "the rest of us" anymore. Sure, a cozy lil' eMac might still be the most user-friendly choice for getting Grandma online to download snapshots of her grandkids, but in recent years Macs are becoming increasingly acceptable among the hardcore nerd crowd who would once have no sooner used a Mac than a VCR Co-Pilot. Chalk part of it up to the inherent Geek Mystique of Mac OS X's underlying UNIX layer, which made iBooks and PowerBooks fashionable at nerd gatherings. The rest of it comes down to Apple's hardware design; sleek portables and a Power Mac G5 that, with a 1 GHz bus, a pair of 64-bit processors, and Spartan aluminum looks to die for, practically qualified as a tech geek's centerfold pin-up. Oh, and let's not forget the instant street cred Apple gained in scientific circles when the world's third-fastest supercomputer turned out to be comprised entirely of desktop Power Macs lashed together for a cost barely more than pocket change.

So the Mac demographic's been veering hard to the tech-savvy side of the bell curve for the past few years, and we're wondering if that's got anything to do with what appears to be a major change in attitude down at One Infinite Loop regarding Apple's consumer-grade hardware. Faithful viewer GotMac noted the appearance of a new support article at Apple's site which lists the user-installable and -replaceable parts in the soon-to-ship iMac G5, and it's a lot longer than we're used to seeing. With the previous iMac ("Ol' Lampy"), the only two user-installable parts were RAM and an AirPort card; ditto the iBook, except you're also allowed to replace the keyboard and battery. Need to swap out a dead hard disk or power supply? Call an authorized service center.

But like we said, that appears to be changing; Apple claims that "the iMac G5 is designed to make it easy for you to install replacement parts if you need to"-- not only the AirPort Extreme card and RAM, but also the internal hard drive, the power supply, the optical drive, the modem, the entire LCD display, and the mid-plane assembly (which includes "the main logic board, the G5 processor, fans, and so forth"). In other words, pretty much the whole darn system is user-replaceable part by part, except for, apparently, the speakers. So don't blow 'em out.

So does this mark a dramatic shift in Apple's attitude toward its customers' confidence and ability to perform more than the very simplest hardware modifications? Could be-- and we're sure that the iMac G5 becomes at least a little more attractive to the tech-savvy folks out there who know that they can pop in a bigger, faster hard drive without having to schlep the system to a service provider or voiding their warranties. Frankly, we like this. While we understood the old "protect the users from themselves" directive, we still found it a teensy bit insulting; now it's like Apple respects our intelligence or something.

Oop-- wait-- scratch that. We just found another support article explaining "how to pick up and carry your iMac G5," which is to: 1) "make sure all cables and cords are disconnected"; 2) "Pick up the iMac G5 by grasping both sides of the computer"; and 3) "carry it to wherever you wish." In other words, once you make sure it's not tied down to anything, the way to pick it up and carry it is to, well, pick it up and carry it. Gee, where's the part about first making sure you have opposable thumbs?

Well, we suppose it could be worse; they could have an article about how to tell whether you've got an HP iPod or an Apple one.

...They do?

It says to look for an HP logo on the back, doesn't it?

Heaven help us all.

Okay, so just how the heck is it that we have never heard about this until now? There's a foot-high Steve Jobs action figure that's been flown all over the world for well over a year, and none of you bothered to tell us? C'mon, people, we rely on you for this sort of thing; we can't dish the drama without the raw materials, and a miniature Steve Jobs winging its way to every corner of the globe constitutes unmined drama ore of the highest caliber-- yet it's been sitting untouched all this time. There's no doubt about it; this here's an intelligence failure of the highest magnitude. No wonder the current Terror Alert Level is Bert.

Faithful viewer Jonathan is off the hook for alerting us soon as he found out about it from a new WIRED article, but we're having a really tough time believing that nobody out there in the studio audience knew about this before today. A guy in the dealmac forums transforms a GI Joe doll into a blue-jeaned, turtlenecked Steve Jobs with an itty-bitty bottle of water, sends this "mini iLeader" from forum member to forum member with a digital camera, collects photos of the miniSteve all over the planet (and in the company of Duran Duran), and no one gets around to telling us? Honestly, what are we paying you for?

Well, okay, technically we're not paying you. But you're not paying us, either (apart from the Karmically InvisiShirted™ among you), and we tell you about all kinds of stuff. It's a take-a-penny / leave-a-penny sort of arrangement, people. Don't make us come up there.

Anyway, yeah-- the mini iLeader's been all over the place, and we strongly suggest you check out some of the photo galleries at work while you're looking to waste a huge chunk of your employer's time; you can kill an hour or two without even trying. (In particular, don't miss him being chased off of Microsoft's campus by security guards in the middle of the night.) Best of all, if the unthinkable happens, now we know where Apple can get a new CEO, albeit a slightly smaller one. In some ways, he's even better; while the real Steve wouldn't set foot anywhere near Boston these days, mini iLeader seems perfectly at home in Beantown, even in front of the convention center where last July's Stevenote didn't happen. If mini's Reality Distortion Field is up to snuff, we'd say we have nothing to worry about.

By the way, if one of you did tell us about this ages ago and it either fell right through one of the more gaping holes in our touch-and-go mental colander-- an increasingly likely scenario these days, we're afraid-- or it's still sitting there in one of those 5,376 unread email messages in our inbox, our apologies. But if you knew and didn't tell us, oooooo, shame. But don't worry, we'll forgive you somehow.