Oooooh, can'tcha just feel the dramatic tension? On the eve of the scheduled ship date of Windows 98 to manufacturers, the other shoe has finally dropped; Windows 98 is officially going to be late, if only for even just a day. Microsoft has agreed to hold off shipping its new OS until Monday; in exchange, the Department of Justice and the twenty state attorneys general currently hot for Microsoft's blood will delay filing any antitrust lawsuits. It's negotiation time in this episode of Redmond Justice; both sides have agreed not to move until everyone's had a chance to discuss things. Read all about it in the San Jose Mercury News.

The story making the rounds is that Microsoft's lawyers are offering "major concessions" regarding the company's allegedly anticompetitive behavior. No one's talking about exactly what those concessions would be, so whether they are major enough to avoid the lawsuits is entirely a matter of speculation. This is a pretty common strategy on Microsoft's part, though; there's a nice little recap of their previously successful "last-minute concessions" strategy in an Associated Press story. Hey, it makes sense-- if you're making money, why change until it's absolutely necessary? (Unless you have a conscience, or something.)

We foresee a very long and thorny weekend for the negotiators from both sides. Suppose there's any chance they can hammer out an agreement by close of business tomorrow, so they can spend the weekend doing something fun?

Another one bites the dust. MacWEEK, the only major weekly Macintosh-centric publication, has announced that in August, it's changing its name to EMedia Weekly and will begin to cover Windows and Unix systems as well as Macs (even more so than now, we assume). EMedia Weekly will focus on digital content creation, regardless of computing platform. The reason for the changeover is reportedly the dwindling advertising revenue available for a strictly Mac-focused publication. CNET's got the whole sordid story.

Well, maybe not the whole sordid story. For the really good dirt, look no further than Mac OS Rumors, whose source tells them that the real reason behind the transformation of MacWEEK is not just money; it's actually money, money, money. Reportedly, there's a specific company behind the overthrow: Intergraph. You may recall Intergraph as the Wintel vendor who had the guts to set up shop at the last MacWorld Expo, hawking "Mac-friendly" Windows NT systems to the Mac-using creative folks. It seems that Intergraph is throwing so much money at MacWEEK lately, they are finding it rather simple to reshape policy. (And yes, you could have guessed, given the veritable Intergraph love-fest in Henry Norr's columns lately.)

The good news is, MacWEEK Online will not be affected by the Windows-izing of the print edition. That means Mac the Knife will apparently still have a home. And the other upside to all this is that now we don't have to worry about filling in that stupid subscription renewal card. See? There's a bright side to everything, if you just look hard enough.

Speaking of the Knife, his latest bit of info really piques our interest. It would appear that Apple has arranged for a little trade with SGI, those wacky purveyors of Unix workstations who have a pretty nice grip on the high-end graphics industry. SGI happens to be the company behind OpenGL, a nice set of 3D programming API's that are rapidly becoming an industry standard, unlike Apple's own Quickdraw 3D, which isn't catching on anywhere outside of the Mac world. Heck, as far as Quickdraw 3D is concerned, even support within the Mac world is sort of sparse.

So what would SGI want from Apple in return for access to OpenGL for Mac OS/Rhapsody? How about Quicktime? Now there's an Apple technology that is rapidly becoming a standard outside of the Mac world; Quicktime 3 for Windows is reportedly doing well, and ISO has selected Quicktime as the starting point for the MPEG-4 specification. Quicktime currently doesn't run on Unix, but if SGI and Apple make their little trade, that may change.

Everybody wins! SGI gets Quicktime running on their workstations, as well as the furthering of their own OpenGL standard by Apple embracing it on the Mac platform. Apple gains a great set of 3D API's which will lead to some excellent modeling and game software (Quake 2, for instance, won't be ported until the Mac OS/Rhapsody supports OpenGL), and Quicktime gets a boost by gaining marketshare on a new platform. Let's hope this all comes off smoothly.