So we keep going back and forth on the potential success of this whole "iPod shuffle" thing. On the one hand, it's cheap, slick-looking, tiny, stores more songs than the competition, and packs a bite-size portion of that inimitable iPod cachet. Good stuff. On the other hand, though, it lacks a screen, so you can't see any stats about what song you're listening to (you know, like its name-- insignificant stuff like that), and there's no reasonable way to jump to a particular song unless a) you happen to remember that it's the 229th song in your playlist, and b) you think you can click the "Next Song" button 228 times without your thumb turning blue and falling off. It does what it's designed to do-- play randomly-chosen music from your iTunes Library-- very well... but is the public willing to give up so much control of their listening experience to the iPod shuffle?

At least one early report hints that, yes, they are; you may recall that one Apple retail store cranked through its entire inventory by selling all 2,000 of the lil' goobers in a mere four hours, which certainly bodes well for the future of the product. The only problem, though, is that the store in question just happens to be in San Francisco, which was overrun at the time by Macworld-attending Apple fanatics eager to blow as much cash as possible on the Next Big (or, uh, Little) Thing™. We're guessing that Apple could have slapped a logo on each of 2,000 bottles of clam juice and the fans would have chugged 'em like Cherry Coke and paid dearly for the privilege. (Note to Apple: consider that a quick moneymaker tip for next year!)

But here's some good news: faithful viewer Bradley Bishop forwarded us a Jiji Press Service article which reveals that the iPod shuffle is going great guns in Japan, too. According to one Apple Japan veep, preorders for the shuffle have officially overtaken the preorders that Apple took for the iPod mini. Of course, the shufflePod costs half as much, so you'd expect more orders-- especially since demand for All Things iPod has skyrocketed since a year ago, as the iPod's 500 percent year-over-year sales growth indicates. But still, at the very least, that many preorders proves that the product won't completely fall flat on its screenless, wheelless face.

Indeed, the iPod shuffle has started out so strong that the Apple veep has officially announced that Apple now aims to increase its share of the Japanese portable digital music player market from its current 50 percent to a whopping and near-Microsoftian 80 percent. What's even more remarkable is that Apple has managed to capture such a huge chunk of the market despite the continuing complete and utter lack of a Japanese iTunes Music Store; 'Podders in the Land of the Rising Sun are still ripping their own tracks. But not for long, Godzilla willing, since Apple now says that it's "steadily continuing its preparations" and "it would not take 12 months before the Apple group starts the service in Japan."

Twelve more months? That sounds like forever to us, but the Japanese have gone this long without it-- and they're still buying 'Pods, to boot, so we figure they'll manage. Meanwhile, the iPod shuffle seems poised and ready to snatch the rest of the market from those non-Apple music pushers. Today Japan; tomorrow the world!

Wuh-oh-- is there trouble in paradise for Steve 'n' Carly? It was just one year ago that Apple and Hewlett-Packard shocked the bejeezus out the industry and Apple enthusiasts alike when both companies announced a Marvel Team-Up on digital music. Rumors that HP (like everyone else and his grandmother) was working on its own iPodalike music player and music download store got blown to smithereens when Carly Fiorina held aloft a milky-blue HP iPod prototype and proclaimed that instead of reinventing the wheel (and doing it badly), HP was instead opting to sell bona fide Apple iPods with the HP logo branded on their heinies. Couple that with an iTunes-on-every-HP-PC deal, and we had all the makings of a match made in heaven.

The partnership started out great; once the company got its iPods out the door, HP vaulted into second place for hard drive-based digital music player sales practically overnight. Okay, sure, second place was only 3.6 percent of the market (compared to Apple's 87.3 percent), but to have instantaneously leapfrogged Rio, Creative, iRiver, and the rest of those guys who'd been beating on each other for months to grab and hold the Silver Medal sales slot, well, that showed that HP had clearly made a smart decision. There's just one problem: according to AppleInsider, the honeymoon's over and the Apple-HP relationship is already experiencing a little healthy conflict. (At least, we hope it's healthy.)

So what's the tiff about? Why, money, of course-- what else? Barely four months after the debut of the "Apple iPod + hp" (which, as we said, has been wildly successful relative to the rest of the market, if not necessarily relative to Apple), Carly is reportedly in a snit because Apple "offers HP no price protection whatsoever on the two models it currently sells." That leaves HP extremely vulnerable to Apple price drops; in the event that it buys a slew of iPods from Apple to resell and then Apple drops the retail price on its own branded iPods, HP would be forced to lower its own retail price to compete and eat the full cost of the difference. Somehow the possibility of this scenario just occurred to HP recently, and when the company asked Apple for a contract amendment to include some sort of price protection policy, Apple flat-out refused... and in response, HP is reportedly withholding retail favors.

That's right, Carly hasn't ordered a single iPod from Apple since the price protection issue came up; the upshot is that HP's online store has been bone-dry of 20 GB iPods for about a week, now, 40 GB iPods are in short supply, and HP says that it does "not expect new shipments anytime soon." Supplies in the retail channel ought to dry up soon as well, and in addition, there's still no firm date for the intro of HP's co-branded iPod photo. And since sales of the HP-branded iPods accounted for a not-entirely-insignificant 7 percent of Apple's total iPod sales last quarter (315,000 iPods is nothing to sneeze at), it's probably in both companies' best interests to get past this argument and kiss and make up.

That said, we're a little surprised that this sort of thing wasn't hammered out before HP and Apple met at the altar. HP and Apple are both big companies, with big legal teams; are we meant to believe that Carly signed that pre-nup without reading it first? Maybe she was so lovestruck with the iPod (and the halo made of dollar signs floating serenely above it) that she signed without logically considering all the consequences. Or maybe she was too dizzy with Reality Distortion Field energy to see straight. After all, she's only human, and she certainly wouldn't be the first person to make an imprudent and irrational financial transaction after caressing an iPod and getting RDFed to the hilt. Here's hoping it all gets straightened out soon-- and without the need for expensive counseling.

It's Friday somewhere in the universe, and you all know what that means: it's Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day! Sure, we know that this installment is even later than usual, but hey, spite has no expiration date, so let's jump right into it before our grandkids file for Social Security, shall we? This time we thought we'd skip over all the evil and/or stupid crap that Microsoft actually did in the past week, and instead focus on something absurd that it might do in the future. That's right, folks, WO-TM-BD was gone all speculative this week, using its own lateness as a springboard into the Void of Maybe, where we'll surf down the timestream to one of infinite alternate eventualities. (Don't worry; Microsoft still sucks in all of them.)

So without further ado, faithful viewer Ken Drake dished us a TechWeb News article which cites newly-RDFed Windows apologist Paul Thurrott as saying that Microsoft currently plans to ship Longhorn (you know, that next-generation version of Windows that was originally supposed to ship in 2003, and now won't ship until 2006-- and only that early because Microsoft keeps lopping giant limbs off its feature set) in no fewer than seven separate and sort-of-distinct versions. If you thought the release of Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional was an unnecessary and confusing arbitrary product split (why didn't they just ship a single unified version called "Windows Crap™"?), just imagine the sheer ridiculousness that'll unfold if Longhorn ships in Home, Professional, Starter Edition, Premium/Media, Small Business, Mobility/Tablet PC, and "Über," a version that allegedly "bridges the consumer and business versions and includes all of the features from the Home, Premium, Pro, Small Business, and Tablet PC Editions (but not Starter Edition)."

Yeah. How could this possibly be a problem?

Like we said, this isn't a done deal just yet-- or at least if it is, Microsoft hasn't publicly said so. But somehow it just rings true as precisely the sort of bonehead move Microsoft is likely to make in the alleged interest of "consumer choice." Apple, always quick to anticipate changes in the market, has already formed an ad hoc committee to research the pros and cons of releasing up to nine different versions of this year's Mac OS X 10.4, code-named Tiger, instead of the single client version that it has always shipped in the past. What the committee found through extensive market research and sophisticated computer modeling was that, on the plus side, releasing seven or more versions of a single operating system slightly increases the chances of multiple sales to a single customer-- especially if each version comes in a different limited edition box with cool holograms on the front and they're labeled "Collect Them All!"

However, the committee determined that among the many, many down sides to such a move is that it's colossally imbecilic; as such, we don't expect to see "Mac OS X 10.4 Dentist's Edition" or "Tiger for Spelunkers" when the operating system ships mid-year. As for Longhorn, well, we suppose we'll just have to wait (and wait, and wait, and wait...) to see. Maybe this distasteful "seven versions" goofiness is just Microsoft's way of making the extensive wait for Longhorn go a little bit faster for its customers, hmm? Perhaps next week they'll announce that Longhorn will be a required upgrade, all other versions of Windows will cease to function when it's released, and installing any of the seven versions will require a series of painful injections into the spine and a forehead tattoo of the COA registration number. That'll make the months just fly by.