You just gotta love the schizoid relationships between big companies, especially in high tech. Take Apple and Microsoft, for example: bitter enemies when it comes to Mac OS vs. Windows or QuickTime vs. Windows Media, right? But whenever they talk to the press about Microsoft Office for the Mac everything's all grins and buddy-buddy. If you've been with the Mac for a while, you may recall Steve Jobs presenting Bill Gates's Big Giant Head (live via satellite) to a Macworld Expo keynote audience and pretty much calling him the savior of the Macintosh. Of course, in the same time frame, Microsoft tried to coerce Apple into killing QuickTime, and threatened to deep-six Mac Office unless Apple made Internet Explorer our default browser; meanwhile, Steve Jobs allegedly bankrolled the Justice Department's "Redmond Justice" case with $10 million in seed money. Gee, with friends like these, who needs a bullet in the head?

That's a pretty extreme example of the corporate love/hate phenomenon, of course, but you get the point. Now, while IBM may once have been The Enemy as far as Mac users were concerned, those days are long gone, right? After all, Big Blue formed one leg of the PowerPC AIM alliance and hasn't really been the biggest name in personal computers for a while, now-- and what with producing the PowerPC 970 that sits at the heart of Apple's new Power Mac G5, IBM may well be a major force in the Mac's new Golden Age. So as far as anyone can tell, everything's all puppies, sunshine, and big sloppy kisses between Apple and IBM.

But maybe not for long. USA Today reports that IBM is sinking a largish wad of cash into an outfit called Threshold Digital Research Labs, which probably wouldn't be a problem if Threshold's digital research had to do with, say, traffic patterns or coffeemakers or orbiting death ray satellites; unfortunately, Threshold makes movies. Animated movies. Computer-animated movies, kinda like those made by a certain other company whose name sounds a lot like "Pixar" and who just happens to share a mercurial CEO with none other than Apple. As the article puts it, "IBM and Threshold plan to challenge Pixar Animation Studios... the undisputed king of computer-generated films." "We want to be the next-generation Pixar," says Threshold's top dog. Time for a little IBM-Steve friction, perhaps?

Only time will tell if IBM and Threshold have the goods to challenge Pixar's spot at the top, but technologically, at least, it sounds like they're in the running: Threshold's first film, Food Fight, is already slated for completion in another year and a half, and apparently it boasts "138 main characters" and "6,254 secondary characters." That's, uh, a lot of characters, all right. Who the heck wrote the script, David Foster Wallace? We obviously can't judge the film until we can see it, of course, but we can't help but think that just because one can make a movie with 6,392 characters doesn't necessarily mean one should, as there's just the slightest chance that doing so might prove a hindrance to telling the story. So maybe Steve has no reason to get all uppity just yet.