Folks, collectively we're as big a fan of the "Wide-Eyed Naïf" look as anybody, but honestly, all the kerfuffle over this alleged leak of the Tiger release date is taking it a little over the top. In case you haven't encountered it yet (which implies that you spent the last couple of days with your eyes closed and your head in a cement mixer at the bottom of the Atlantic, because it was slathered all over the Mac-centric 'net like gravy on a dry biscuit), there's been a bit of a to-do over the fact that, as faithful viewer Sam first alerted us, Amazon.com had started taking Mac OS X 10.4 preorders-- and was quoting a ship date of March 31st, 2005. Since Apple's only public commitment to a release date of its next major operating system upgrade has been "first half of 2005," a bunch of people assumed that Amazon was privy to extra-super-special-secret insider information and had accidently blabbed it to the world.

But before you go buying a 2005 calendar just to circle that magical date in red Sharpie and then decorate it with colored glue, glitter, and prismatic tiger stickers (why, yes, we are currently enrolled in a parent-toddler art class-- why do you ask?), you should probably go talk to anyone who spent the early-mid-'90s preordering what few Mac games were slated to grace our platform. See, back before Internet commerce was all the rage, you had a better chance of striking oil while digging in your Mr. T Chia Pet than you had of finding Mac games on retail shelves, so we generally bought our software by mail order from catalogs-- actual paper ones-- like MacWarehouse and MacConnection. And it was back then that we learned the number one rule of software mail order: release dates in those catalogs didn't mean squat. Heck, they didn't even mean squa.

We're not sure if this is actually true, but we'd heard it widely reported that mail order companies weren't legally allowed to accept preorders for merchandise unless they provided at least a tentative ship date. So what would they do when they wanted scads of slavering Mac gamers on the hook for a copy of, say, Marathon 2 when the developers (Bungie-- you know, before the most egregious sellout in the history of the known universe) had a strict policy against ever announcing release dates until the product was actually in boxes and out the door? Well, duh-- they made their "tentative release dates" up out of thin air, or pulled them out of a convenient body cavity or whatever. See, those release dates just had to be there, they didn't have to be accurate. But people new to the scene would get a new catalog and then breathlessly post to the 'net that "WoozleWuzzle is shipping next month!!!!" only to be shot down when the guy who was writing WoozleWuzzle would calmly post that, no, it wouldn't be.

So we consider it more than likely that Amazon's March 31st ship date for Tiger is just another one of those "tentative" dates provided to allow the acceptance of preorders. Consider that March 31st is smack-dab in the very middle of the "first half of 2005" and you might get an idea of how Amazon came up with the date. And anyone who honestly thinks that even Apple could have narrowed Tiger's projected ship date down to a specific day nearly six months in advance probably isn't too familiar with the development process of large software projects. If anything, Apple's probably narrowed things down to which of the two quarters it's shooting for, but we doubt it's gotten as far as targeting a month, let alone a day.

The point's kind of moot now, anyway, since Amazon has since pulled the release date and the ability to preorder Tiger; the page now just says that "this item is not stocked or has been discontinued." (And no, we don't think Apple made them do that because the March 31st date was real. Just a hunch.) Regardless, though, Amazon must have booked a fair number of preorders before it pulled the date, because when last we checked, Tiger had a sales ranking of 39. Interestingly enough, there were also seven customer reviews of a product that's at least two and a half months from shipping; some are based on the developer preview, some just list features that Apple's made public, and one claims to be from the future and declares Tiger to be "well worth the $11." Which is good to know, and all, but we wish the time-travelling reviewer had mentioned when the product actually shipped, so we'd know whose "tentative ship dates" to believe from now on.