Who says there's no up side to being late all the time? Sure, broadcasting last Friday's episode in the wee hours of this fine Monday morning may seem like a serious breach of scheduling protocol, but in reality it's actually just a cunning strategy to bring you far more drama that you'd have otherwise received. No, honestly! Consider, for instance, the ancient Friday tradition of Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day; all those so-called "punctual" 'net-based Apple-flavored soap operas out there probably dished you up a slice o' fun about Microsoft's attempted antitrust weasel-move over there in Europe. But by broadcasting a mere three days late, we get to bring you something far juicier. See? When you slather on a heaping helping of procrastination, everybody wins!

Not that the European antitrust thing isn't entertaining, mind you. Had we been cursed with the fetters of punctuality, we almost certainly would've based our own Microsoft-bash around it, because it's a nice, solid plot element upon which to build a healthy kick in Microsoft's mighty crotch, metaphorically speaking. You remember when Europe had the stones to do what the U.S. Department of Justice did not, right? It smacked Microsoft down with a massive fine and several sanctions intended to prevent it from illegally wielding monopoly power quite so blatantly in the future. One of those remedies was requiring the company to offer a separate version of Windows that wasn't tied to Windows Media Player. Well, true to form, Microsoft agreed-- but according to a CNET article pointed out by faithful viewer Sam Beard, the company planned to name the unbundled version "Windows XP Reduced Media Edition" and sell it for full price.

Oooh, yeah, that'll sell like hotcakes! Needless to say, the European Commission wasn't amused, and is forcing Microsoft to change the name to something less transparently equivalent to "Windows XP Overpriced Crap Version" (which, frankly, we find a little redundant), thus foiling Microsoft's obvious attempt to keep sales of the non-WMP version so low they'd put Microsoft Bob to shame. Still, it was nice of Microsoft to remind us all just how stupid they honestly think the rest of the planet must be, which is, of course, one of the classic topics for a WO-TM-BD rant-- assuming you actually broadcast Friday's material on Friday like some kind of chump.

In stark contrast, by blowing it off through the weekend, we get to bring you something even more enjoyable, courtesy of faithful viewer Darth Mac and the BBC News article he forwarded us on Sunday morning. See, apparently there was some big flap in the UK press last week about "a page of notes and doodles" that Prime Minister Tony Blair allegedly left behind on the podium after speaking at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Switzerland; the page was submitted to psychologists and handwriting analysts, who, after examining the drawings and writing in detail, declared that they were the work of a person who is "struggling to concentrate," "struggling to keep control of a confusing world," "not a natural leader," and "an unstable man who is feeling under enormous pressure." Yikes! Bad news for Blair, right?

Except, of course, that the doodles and notes weren't his. Guess who else spoke at that same podium?

That's right, kiddies, the British government has officially declared that the insecure, unstable fella with poor concentration who scribbled those notes was not Mr. Blair, but one Bill Gates, who shared the podium at the same press conference-- and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has confirmed that, in all likelihood, Billy-Boy is indeed the doodlemeister that the psychologists have been picking apart in the press. Wow... suddenly it all makes sense. How do you suppose Bill feels about his mother?

And to think that if we had broadcast this episode on time, we'd have had to sit on this awesome development for another week, at which point it'd be so old hat we'd probably have had to pass it up in favor of a fresher bonehead Microsoft move. Dodged a bullet, there, huh? So always remember, friends, the secret ingredient to spice up any endeavor is procrastination: jazzing up drama since time immemorial! (Or, at least, since three days later than it was supposed to start.) Try some today!

Or tomorrow. Whenever.

Justice at last! Everyone knows that Apple has long been one of the most influential brands in existence, and back in 2002 the company was rightfully named the "Global Brand of the Year" in an annual survey of thousands of "ad executives, brand managers, and academics" who read Brandchannel.com. But disaster struck in 2003, when Apple slipped to the number 2 spot and Google finished on top. Worse yet, Google edged out Apple again last year; granted, more people use search engines than have iPods, but most of them are searching for iPods, so we have to wonder about this Google-over-Apple thing, brandwise.

But like we said, order has finally been restored to the universe: faithful viewer Matt Banks pointed out that, according to Reuters, Apple's brand is officially back in first place (globally and in North America), while Google's got the Silver Medal Boo-Hoos this time around. Brandchannel editor Robin Rusch attributes Apple's advance to-- what else?-- the iPod's "avalanche of demand," which really gathered steam in the final quarter of the year to "put Apple in the lead." Google's plan to scan and index library books is cool and all, but it just doesn't have the branding oomph of yuletide knife-fights at the mall over the last silver iPod mini. After all, if people aren't spilling blood over something, just how influential can it be?

AtAT sources report that Google employees are shattered by their company's slide to second place, but remain hard at work on new technologies that they hope might win the "Best Brand" title back from Apple in 2006. Among these advances are: a search engine endorsed by an Irish rock supergroup; smaller, sleeker search engines that come in five different metallic colors; and a much lighter search engine that only returns up to 240 hits, but returns them in random order. Google execs are confident that such moves will put the company back on top next year, just as long as Apple doesn't release an iPod with a search engine within the next twelve months.

By the way, here's an interesting side-note: while Apple topped the North American list of "most influential brands," Pixar managed to squeeze into fifth place, just behind Starbucks, Target, and formerly-first Google. That means that on Steve Jobs's home turf, both of the companies for which he works his CEO mojo made the list of the continent's top five brands. Of course, no one who's familiar with the mind-bending power of Steve's Reality Distortion Field will be surprised, since perception of the strength of a brand is exactly the sort of thing that the RDF is best at controlling.

Here's hoping that Steve continues to use his powers for good instead of evil; otherwise one day we might all suddenly decide that we really like NECCO Wafers or something.

The annual Florida Educational Technology Corporation conference just finished up on Friday, but you wouldn't know it by anything Apple's said-- at least, nothing it's said officially. See, FETC is one of those conferences at which Apple traditionally rolls out quiet little advances in education technology, like new versions of PowerSchool or the Apple Store for Education; in years past, it also used the event as an excuse to issue press releases trumpeting the company's top spot in education market share. But Apple lost those bragging rights to Dell years ago, and apparently it's got nothing new education-wise that's important enough to rate a full-blown press release, so FETC has come and gone with nary a whimper.

But that doesn't mean there wasn't some juicy Apple news on the show floor. According to a blog posting at gilgamesh.ca by someone who attended, one of the Apple reps in the company's booth was surprisingly candid about a pending education laptop deal that Apple is reportedly close to winning. If Booth Guy has his facts straight, then Atlanta's Cobb County wants to stick portables in its students' backpacks and has narrowed the manufacturer field down to just two finalists: Apple and IBM.

That's noteworthy in part because education top dog Dell has apparently dropped out-- presumably because Cobb County doesn't want to pay more than $275 per laptop, and Dell isn't hungry enough to eat that kind of cost. Apple, on the other hand, is probably starving to return to its former education glory, and would love nothing more than to pump another county's schools full to bursting with iBooks, even if that means it might have to forgo a little thing like "profit" in order to do so. Why IBM is still in the mix is beyond us, seeing as the company was so sick of the whole personal computing spiel that it sold its entire PC business to China's Lenovo. Maybe Lenovo's just looking to score some street cred as a newly-international PC manufacturer; who knows? But if Apple is willing to beat low-cost champ Dell on price, we doubt the company's going to roll over for Lenovo. It must want this contract bad.

"But AtAT," you might well ask, "why so much fuss over just one county? How big a deal could that really be?" Pretty darn big, as it turns out, folks; gilgamesh.ca claims that the deal is worth a whopping 60,000 laptops. That's a whole lot more than the 23,000-iBook Henrico County deal that kicked off the whole "massive purchases of AirPort-enabled iBooks for school use" trend back in 2001, and which, at the time, was the "largest portable computer sale to education ever." And it's even more than Apple's original 38,600-iBook contract for the entire state of Maine. Heck, it's almost as big as both of those mammoth deals put together. So yeah, this officially qualifies as a Big Deal™.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a decision might be reached as early as February 9th. We'll keep our fingers crossed for Apple, since an extra 60,000 units in the school system (even at an unconscionably low price) would be a nice big step for Apple towards regaining its education sales crown. And Steve looks really, really good in a tiara.