Relax, folks, we're all safe for now; you may recall that when Steve Jobs was up for Billboard's "Visionary of the Year" award against Rob Glaser of RealNetworks-- yes, the guy whose "vision" was to sell songs just like Apple does, try to license Apple's FairPlay DRM so his music would play on iPods, publicly liken Apple to communist Russia when the company refused, and then reverse-engineer iPod compatibility without permission-- we voiced concern that a Glaser win might prompt a global Jobsian rampage that'd make Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like minigolf and a day at the petting zoo. Well, according to faithful viewer Jay, the results have been posted, and Steve won. Feel free to heave a ragged sigh of relief. (And we hope you haven't literally been holding your breath, because the winners were actually announced last Friday night. Our bad.)

So, in addition to having been named "Leader in Innovation" by CNBC and the Wall Street Journal, now Steve is also officially the "Visionary of the Year," which is, of course, just as it should be. There's a little more good news, too, which is that Apple also won as "Brand of the Year," beating out EA Sports, Virgin Mobile, and XM Satellite Radio. It's not all puppy dogs and Slim Jims, though; while Apple had been nominated for "Innovator of the Year" for iTunes, it wound up losing the title to XM. Apparently commercial-free monthly-fee radio whose programming you still can't fully control is a bigger innovation than commercial-free music you buy and play exactly whenever and however you want. Good to know. We hate to be behind the times.

But if Apple is miffed about that, the company must be positively hypervolcanic over what was named "Digital Music Innovation of the Year": none other than Harmony, the very RealNetworks software that allows Real's songs to be played on iPods without the company having licensed FairPlay. While we can't condone it, truth be told, we can at least understand Billboard's reasoning behind assigning Harmony the win-- right now it looks like the only step anyone's taken to unify all these balkanized digital music formats and make all music work on all players. (Well, the only step other than Microsoft trying to ram Windows Media down everyone's throat, that is, which even Steve Ballmer on acid probably wouldn't dare call "innovation" for fear of finally being struck down by divine lightning.)

On top of that, we're not even sure that Apple's really all that upset that Harmony exists. Sure, it pitched the statement-to-the-press equivalent of a hissy fit when Harmony was first released, but if it really objected (and thought it had a case), surely we would have heard about a lawsuit by now. And while Apple warned that Harmony might break in future iPod firmware updates, there have been at least a couple since Harmony's release, and as far as we've heard Harmony still works fine. The company had to protest in public, if for no reason other than because of the way Real did its dirty work-- but behind closed doors, maybe it doesn't so much mind fewer people having a reason not to buy an iPod.

Whatever. Even if Apple silently allows Harmony's existence (and that's a big "if"), it's got to chafe a few hinders over at One Infinite Loop that Real's brute-force, legally-iffy forced entry into the iPod playground is being heralded as the "Digital Music Innovation of the Year" when Apple itself wasn't even nominated in the category. Perhaps Stevezilla will rampage after all? Keep one ear open for the air raid sirens...