Back in August 1990 I spent a week in the desert in Utah doing mushrooms (or was it peyote) with this weird naked Indian dude and watching bullet cars run on the Bonneville Salt Flats and while I was there, during this period of intense spiritual work, I felt this huge ripple in the force around me and realized, long before it happened, that Microsoft was headed for trouble with antitrust regulators. The Office suite was not a big deal yet but you could see where things were headed since their stated aim was to tie the apps to each other and to the OS and to wipe out a swath of the software industry.

The point of this reminiscing? For a while now I’ve felt the same weird rippling energy in the air around me. I’ve been waiting for someone to drop the M word about Apple. Now here it is. To be sure, these lawsuits are absolutely without merit. We’ll win them, no problem. The more signficant news is that the M bomb has been dropped. Things like this take on a power of their own. Once someone has dared to say it, it becomes easier for others to say it too. Pretty soon it becomes accepted as fact. So. Here we are then. Alea iacta est, as Napoleon said when he crossed the Rubicon.