It may be Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day (sort of), but just for a change of pace, we're not going to do the obvious thing. Oh, don't get us wrong-- we're still going to bash Microsoft. (After all, the last thing we need today is the shakes.) It's just that we're not going to bash them in the manner in which you're probably expecting, i.e. by harping on a couple of technical screwups during Bill Gates's last keynote. No, we're all about the aftermath on this one.

A bit of extra setup: faithful viewer Brett Chaffer shed a little more light on the subject of one of our recent rants, namely the lack of Mac support in TiVoToGo: according to CNET, Bill Gates spent a chunk of time at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this week bragging about Microsoft's partnership with TiVo, strongly implying that TiVoToGo won't work on Macs for the same reason that none of the "Plays For Sure" music download services will, either: Microsoft still hasn't ported Window Media Digital Rights Management to the Mac.

So given that Microsoft is partially responsible for our current TiVolian woes, you might well expect us to bash Laughin' Bill for screwing up his keynote at the very same show where he bragged about getting in bed with TiVo in the first place. And we certainly could, of course, given that faithful viewer Jeff Duran forwarded us an Associated Press article which reports that Bill's keynote "promoting what he calls the 'digital lifestyle'" (gee, where have we heard that before?) was plagued by "technical glitches that prompted jokes and guffaws"-- glitches including a Windows Media Center PC that froze up during a digital photography presentation and an all-out Blue Screen of Death on an Xbox during a demo of a game's "ostensible user-friendliness."

The thing is, though, a Windows demo without a cock-up is only about as rare as a garden snail without opposable thumbs-- and anyway, the Great Gates Keynote Debacle has already been ridiculed about a zillion times, including in real time by Conan O'Brien, who was onstage next to Gates when the magic happened. So frankly, we're not going to bother, but if you're really interested in watching a demo go kaflooey, faithful viewer Dan Tappan was kind enough to point out that there's a streaming video of the carnage on Microsoft's own web site-- or, rather, there was. This, folks, is where the real bashing comes in, and well-deserved it is, too: Microsoft had originally posted Bill's entire keynote. Sure, on a Mac you needed Windows Media Player 9 to watch it (must... suppress... gag reflex), but it worked, and the freeze-up occurred at about the 25-minute mark, while the BSOD nightmare started at about an hour and ten minutes into the stream. But gee, guess what Microsoft did?

That's right, they removed the keynote stream and replaced it with five poorly-edited "highlights." Some of them cut off right in the middle of a sentence; they must have edited them with Microsoft Movie Maker. Not that it matters, because Bill's not saying anything interesting anyway-- the real "highlights" of the presentation were the crashes and blue-screens, which are now, all too predictably, nowhere to be found. The blurb on the page says "See the future. Today." What it should say is "See the Past. Almost like it really happened."

It's sad, really. After all, everyone has bad demos now and again; Steve Jobs has had his share of keynote mishaps, including app crashes, hardware malfunctions, and the like. The difference is that when Apple posted the streams, it posted the real deal. It didn't act like a pathetically insecure six-year-old whose mother never held it enough by editing out the problems and pretending that they never happened. But we guess it takes all kinds of fruit to make fruit cup. Incidentally, is there a fruit called a "revisionistberry"?