It's time once again to play Guess That Launch! Yes, folks, it's the Mac community's favorite game of intrigue and limb-rending mayhem, as contestants from all over the world compete for fabulous prizes by guessing just when the heck Apple will finally manage to get various products and services out the door! (Eat your heart out, Bob Barker.)

As you all know, we've been playing this game an awful lot lately, but we've been focusing ad nauseam on the rumored Power Mac G5 updates, with just a little smidge of PowerBook and eMac prognostication thrown in to break up the monotony. This time, though, how about we go totally hog wild? Instead of an Apple product, we'll play with an Apple service-- and just to be completely wacky, we'll limit the service's rollout to a completely different continent! Whoa! It's like we're groovin' on too many SweeTarts or something! Somebody call the men in white coats!

So here's the deal: this time around, we're going to be trying to guess the launch date of the iTunes Music Store-- in Europe. Just a few weeks ago this might have been a trick question, but now that iPhoto print- and book-ordering has finally made it across the pond, we can rest assured that it is, indeed, physically possible for Apple to launch services in Europe without the universe exploding at the speed of light. So Euro-iTMS is coming-- but when? Yeah, that's the tricky part. The good news is that Apple's European bigwig gave us all an official clue; the bad news is, said clue might have impatient Europeans throwing themselves off tall buildings, because while the general consensus had previously expected a Euro-iTMS rollout this spring, the official word from Apple is decidedly less optimistic.

Faithful viewer mrmgraphics forwarded us a Reuters article which quotes Apple Europe Chief Pascal Cagni (a.k.a. "Euro-Steve") as stating that "when we launch in Europe, we want to do it well. There can be no compromise on the ease of use, the depth of the catalog, or the responsiveness [of the store]." And that streak of perfectionism translates into the attitude that, because the project is so gosh-darned important, "a few months' delay is not essential." So much for spring. At the very least, though, when asked if the store would make it online by the end of the year, Cagni reportedly replied "absolutely." That may be scant comfort to those of you who originally expected Euro-iTMS to surface last September, but hey, at least we're down to a sub-year wait.

Anyway, there's the latest: Euro-iTMS is coming sometime this year-- now it's up to you to figure out exactly when. Guess correctly and you can act really smug for entire minutes before people will seriously threaten to beat you up if you don't stop. We were totally lying about that whole "fabulous prizes" thing, though. But at least you get the smugness, and isn't that a lot better than a supply of Turtle Wax and the home version of the game?