Bill, Bill, Bill... Is that fear we smell? We know that your recent "fireside chat" commercial was carefully engineered to draw attention to your "even billionaires shop at T.J. Maxx" sweater and away from the hunted look in your eyes, but even without the miracle of Smell-O-Vision, we still thought we detected a whiff of Eau de Deer in Headlights wafting from the direction of the TV. (Or maybe we dropped a half-eaten Tofu Pup behind the set a couple of weeks ago-- we can never be too sure.) Anyway, the sheer surreality of the whole thirty-second spot effectively blinded us to your real plan for dealing with your company's potential Death by a Zillion Lawsuits, which became clear as day during your WinHEC keynote address: pretend like the government's lawsuit doesn't exist, adopt a new slogan and run it into the ground, and take nervous and irrelevant swipes at the competition.

WinHEC, for the uninitiated, isn't where naughty Microsoft operating systems go after they die if they weren't quite evil enough for WinHELL; it's the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference. And what better place for Bill to break in a new slogan than in front of his legions of adoring fans? Read about it at ZDNet; deftly avoiding any mention whatsoever of the "Redmond Justice" fracas and MSFT's resulting earthward tumble, the spiritual leader of the western world repeated his closing mantra from the sweater commercial. Yes, evidently Microsoft has decided to retire their tired, old "Where do you want to go today?" slogan, replacing it instead with a brand new tired, old slogan: "The best is yet to come." Now that's innovation, baby!

But what really reeks of fear was Bill's nasty jab at the iMac-- a friendly little computer what never done no harm to nobody nohow. Claiming that the upcoming and lamely-named "Windows ME" operating system will boot in a mere twenty-five seconds (uh, on what kind of computer? Details, schmetails), Bill drew an unpleasant comparison to Apple's best-selling consumer system, which he claims takes a minute and ten seconds to start up. "We could have demonstrated that," he intoned, "but we just don't have the time for it." Har de har har. The other reason he didn't demonstrate it is that it's apparently a big fat lie; a MacCentral reader timed his iMac/333 booting and says it clocked in at 46 seconds. Note that that's not even a current iMac running the current version of the Mac OS. Evidently Microsoft didn't learn a thing from the trial; those guys still think that if it can be faked on tape, it must be true.

Never mind the fact, of course, that the current development version of Mac OS X reportedly boots "vital services" on a G3/450 in 21 seconds. The real question to ask yourself is, is this really going to be Microsoft's grand marketing strategy to sell Windows ME-- it reboots faster? Let's give them the benefit of the doubt for a second and assume that, yes, when the OS ships, a WinME system will boot forty-five seconds faster than an iMac. Let's also assume that, for whatever reason, I start up and shut down my iMac every day instead of using that nifty "Sleep" feature. Why, by switching to a WinME system, I could save myself over five minutes a week! Ooooh, sign us up! Yup, it's fear we smell, plain and simple.