Alas, poor Sony; if any company had a shot at unseating Apple from the Digital Music Throne, we thought it would be the tech-savvy consumer electronics giant who also happens to be one of the Big Five major record labels and who enjoyed decades of consumer worship for the invention of the Walkman. But between a lackluster online music store that sells songs in the proprietary ATRAC3 format and a slew of expensive portable digital music devices that can't even play MP3s, Sony has yet to become more than the faintest blip on the radar. Oh, how the mighty have fallen and they can't get up.

But don't count Sony out just yet, because the company is working to change all that. In addition to taking baby steps to introducing MP3 compatibility to some of its cheaper players (someday) (maybe), faithful viewer Frozen Tundra also notes that, according to Reuters, the company is planning a "marketing blitz in Europe" to get the word out to the people about its Connect music download store and its new iPodalikes, the ever-so-snappily-titled NW-HD1 and NW-HD2, which will no doubt soon be household names in Europe (at least among households that name their pets and children using strings of seemingly random alphanumeric characters). So will such a marketing push really be able to "derail the runaway momentum of Apple Computer's iTunes service"?

Well, um, if history is any indication, probably not. Let's not forget that the now-defunctish BuyMusic.com anticipated sales of a million songs a day and launched with a $40 million high-profile ad campaign that incorporated heavy-rotation TV commercials, giant billboards in Times Square, and CEO Scott Blum and spokescreep Tommy Lee weaseling their way onto every radio and TV show they could find-- all to less than no avail. Granted, BuyMusic was always the idiot cousin in the dysfunctional family of music download services, but Napster's "strength of brand" and TV commercials haven't exactly vaulted it into the lead, either, and RealNetworks pulling lame but headline-grabbing stunts like FreedomofMusicChoice.org and half-price downloads didn't get its sales volume anywhere near Apple's, even when it was losing money on every sale.

But Sony's a very different animal, and Europe is a very different market, so who knows what results a marketing assault across the pond might produce? And we haven't even mentioned Sony's trump card yet: the NW-HD2 now comes in silver, blue, and pink brushed aluminum, just like Apple's wildly successful iPod mini. Faithful viewer Small Paul notes that photos appear over at Engadget, which describes the players as "craptacular" because of their ATRAC3-only nature. Still, these things look enough like minis (minus green and gold options-- evidently Sony is happy relinquishing the lucrative leprechaun demographic to Apple) that there's no way consumers could ever tell the difference! What could possibly go wrong?

We're opting for a mellow end to a mellow week, here, folks, and since nothing much of dramatic import is currently churning the Apple waters, we thought we'd pass along a cute and highly encouraging nugget o' knowledge that lends still more credence to all the recent rumors that Mac sales are enjoying a dramatic spike thanks to rampant love of the iPod. After all, what better way to start a weekend than by basking in the limitless possibilities of a future in which Macs outsell all Wintels combined? Not that we're claiming a 50%-or-better market share is actually in Apple's cards, mind you (at least as far as the Mac is concerned), but it's hard to imagine that Apple will continue to command a mere 2ish percent of the personal computer market what with all the activity we're seeing at one major online retailer.

That retailer is Amazon.com, which, in addition to being an online source of everything from cheesy metal electric guitars to gourmet coffee to laser scopes (and, um, books), also happens to sell computers-- including Macs. And what's cool about that is that Amazon always lets you see what the top sellers are in any given category, and the ranking is updated every day. So check it out: faithful viewer RAY I noticed that Amazon's top-selling notebook is the entry-level iBook, and Apple has a total of three laptop models in the top ten. Cool, no?

Indeed, if you look at the top sellers among computer stuff in general, Apple fared either slightly better or slightly worse, depending on your perspective. True, the number one product in the Computers category is a Linksys wireless router, but second and third place are held by iPod minis, and iPods of various types hold four of the top ten slots.

As for desktop systems, well, that's where the seriously encouraging stuff is happening. A practically frightening seven of the ten best-selling desktop systems are Macs, with iMac G5s taking the top three slots. Now, we don't know if Amazon somehow appeals more to Mac users than to the Wintel crowd (we can't imagine why), but clearly Macs are selling like crazycakes there, and it's hard not to get visions of double-digit market share dancing in our heads, no matter how improbable we know that to be. Still, how can you look at those rankings and not grin like a maniac?

So the next time you're bumming about Apple's piddling little market share, remember that those numbers include vast fleets of PCs sold into enterprise markets, a giant sandbox where Apple doesn't even try to play. Amazon sells to consumers, just like Apple, so take a spin over there and look at their daily top sellers. We can't predict exactly what you'll see, but we bet it'll probably make you feel loads better.

Ah, once again Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day comes bounding up to us, yapping joyously and licking our faces in merry wonderment-- and this time our episode is actually broadcasting on the day itself, instead of being "observed" the day after like some second-rate federal holiday time-shifted to grant the plebes a three-day weekend in spite of some niggling accident of chronology. So, given both the special occasion of our unlikely promptness and the bumper crop of Redmond-hostile news bytes this week, in what manner do you propose that we celebrate both this weekly holiday and our own freakish burst of punctuality?

Perhaps by indulging in a mean-spirited bout of intellectual property schadenfreude! After all, there's plenty to go around; for one thing, according to The Register, the bigwigs at 3GPP choose a variant of Apple's favorite AAC digital audio format as the "codec of choice for 3G-delivered audio content." Remember, AAC was also picked as the official format for encoded music on DVD Audio discs, and with Microsoft pushing its own proprietary Windows Media format for everything from music to movies to digital livestock and canned goods, we can't imagine that it's too happy about these continuing legitimizations of the AAC format.

In a similar vein, we could gloat about how Microsoft just lost its patent on the ubiquitous FAT file system, which debuted back in the DOS days and which is still used on flash media for the storage of digital photos and the like. The patent didn't mean much in practical terms until last year, when Microsoft finally decided that it could stuff its cash mattress even fuller by licensing out the patent and thus extorting royalties from all those manufacturers who would otherwise have to redesign any devices that violated its terms. Anyway, the Patent and Trademark office has nullified Microsoft's FAT patent, citing the existence of prior art, so there goes that superfluous revenue source, then.

On the other hand, we could always fall back on the age-old classic of "Viral Armageddon." While we don't recall hearing anything about any newly-discovered Microsoft security flaws this week (miracles do happen!), faithful viewer Julian Clark tipped us off to a report from BBC News which claims that the JPEG buffer underrun bug we mentioned last week is now being actively exploited. It seems that there are some porn images floating around out there that, when simply looked at in Windows Explorer, can trigger the hush-hush installation of unwanted software allowing the Bad Guys (no, not Microsoft-- the other Bad Guys) to seize control of an affected Windows machine from anywhere on the Internet. Yeah, that inspires confidence.

But you know what? On this particular Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day, we think we're going to have to settle for plain ol' weirdness to the max. Faithful viewer Dave Sawyer was the first to point out Microsoft's Office 2004 for Mac sweepstakes, in which nine lucky entrants will win a free copy of Office and-- this is the spooky bit, here-- "a business professional action figure made to look just like you-- only all business." Yes, if you enter this contest and win, Microsoft somehow makes a teensy little plastic replica of you, sticks it in a business suit, and sends it to you along with a copy of its productivity suite. Tell us that's not the creepiest thing you've heard in ages. Suppose they request that you send in a complete set of head shots from which they model the doll, or are they just going working from swiped ATM video footage and spy satellite photos? (Everybody knows they're watching your every move, right?)

Knowing what you know about Microsoft, then, obviously we suggest that you stay well away from the Office sweepstakes, because you'd have to be a pretty trusting soul not to think that Microsoft is making extra doll-copies of all those Mac-happy winners, reaching for the hatpins and hot wax, and using them as convenient voodoo dolls to strike against the Mac community. Oh, paranoid, are we? Sure, we're paranoid. Paranoid like a fox.