Is there any greater joy than discovering yet another CNET-sponsored, multi-stage product and/or service "showdown"? If there is, we sure hope we never encounter it, because our heads would likely explode with delight. In fact, we only barely managed to survive the sheer bliss of last June's "Heavyweight OS Death Match," more so because somehow (and we bet CNET's still trying to figure this one out) Mac OS X beat out Windows 2000. So you can imagine our excitement when faithful viewer Jef Van der Voort kindly informed us that CNET is at it again... and this time it's Apple vs. Microsoft from a technical support perspective. (Why this isn't on Pay-Per-View, we'll never know.)

Yes, CNET pitted Apple against the Redmond Beast in four tech support categories: self-help, online support, phone support availability, and phone support effectiveness. Both companies were rated in each round using the extremely technical and precise "letter grade with pluses and minuses" approach. And talk about your close matches! In the self-help category, Microsoft's "B" barely edged out Apple's "B-"; Redmond again won by a nose in the online help round, nudging past Apple's "A-" with a solid "A." But Apple fights back in the phone support categories, besting Microsoft by a full letter grade ("B" to "C") for availability before tying at a "B" for effectiveness.

The final result? A tie... or at least, that's what CNET says. Overall, the article reports that both companies get a "B," but the mathematical precision of CNET's letter grade ranking system sort of loses a little credibility since fully half of the grades reported in the final report card summary are not the grades reported in the individual contest rounds. (If you figure final scores with the actual awarded grades, Apple just barely wins overall.) We are utterly shocked to discover that CNET may not have exercised an appropriate level of care and attention to detail when performing this showdown. What do those guys think this is, an Olympic exhibition sport?

Anyway, if you take this showdown seriously at all, you can either choose to be happy that Apple's tech support is just as good as Microsoft's, or you can be appalled that we Mac users now get support that's apparently hardly better than what those Windows people get dished up. We understand that Apple moved to a more "Microsoft-like" (hey, Apple said it, not us) support policy as a necessary cost-saving measure, but we can't help feeling that becoming more like Microsoft in any way other than financially isn't a wonderful thing. In any case, we'll probably mourn the loss of the once-mighty "free lifetime phone support" 'til we gasp our dying breaths. In the meantime, we'll just petition CNET for a recount.