Let us set one thing straight: the odor emanating from Bill Gates in London as he publicly casts wildly unsupported (and unsupportable) aspersions on the security in Mac OS X is not fear. Bill isn't scared of Mac OS X, because Microsoft is way too huge an entity to be seriously threatened by, well, anything at this point, so what you're smelling off of Bill is presumably whatever substance he ingests that lets him stand up in front of a crowd and tell them that Windows is so much more secure than Mac OS X or Linux even as people in his audience are scrambling from the room to answer frantic emergency pages about havoc caused by the MyDoom worm. (We don't know what that substance is, but it smells a little like Otto's jacket.)

No, the piquant stench of raw, unadulterated fear is instead wafting this way from a city about 600ish miles to London's south-southeast, so aim your Smelloscopes at Cannes, France-- and please, no tired jokes about French cowardice; that's so 2003. And none of those "stinky French" gags either! After all, the source of this particular odor isn't even native to the area: it's Napster CEO and (apparently) U.S. citizen Chris Gorog. According to a Macworld UK article brought to our attention by faithful viewer Eric Beyer, Gorog in is Cannes at the Midem international music fair and he actually "warned music delegates... to 'stay off the Apple platform.'" Ohhhh, so that's what fear smells like!

See, Gorog's desperate gambit is to try to persuade music executives to "make their record catalogs available on Napster rather than Apple" by affirming that Napster's Windows Media format "is compatible with two-thirds of all the mobile music devices currently available." Oh, sure, that's a valid argument. Yeah, great, WMA is compatible with two-thirds of the players on the market-- just not the one single player that everyone's actually buying and using. Is Gorog hoping that these music execs don't realize that the iPod is still tops in unit sales? Trust us, they know-- heck, most of them probably have iPods. Given the level of devotion out there, we bet at least one or two of those music execs have married their 'Pods by now.

And even supposing that a music publisher agrees with Gorog and decides that licensing its catalog to Napster for sale in the WMA format is a smart business move, what's preventing the same publisher from also licensing the same music to Apple so it'll work on the iPod? This isn't an "either-or" situation; if it were, all of the other music services here in the U.S. would be in serious trouble (well, okay, more serious trouble), because Apple had those original 200,000 songs first. Napster's virtual shelves would be mighty empty if the company couldn't license music that Apple already sells. "Welcome to the new Napster: twelve songs and counting!" So waving WMA around as a reason to "steer clear of Apple" doesn't even make sense.

Talk about your Hail Mary plays, there; something tells us that Napster isn't selling nearly as many songs as it had hoped. Heck, even Gorog's publicity photo betrays a high level of anxiety-- is that a sheen of terror sweat we see? No wonder we can smell the fear from 3,800 miles away. By the way, who knew that fear smells like sardines and Pine-Sol?