The vague "memorandum of understanding" between the BBC and Microsoft presents an obvious gag - what's a bloated, monopolistic giant struggling to find its way in the digital future doing snuggling up to Microsoft? Boom boom.
That's slightly unfair. While the BBC commercial competitors complain that Auntie has a monopolist's grip online and in broadcast, there's only one convicted abuser of monopoly power in this engagement, and it's Microsoft.
The software giant is a big brute of a company that - after a heyday in the 1990s which saw it crunch competition under foot - is finding the going a lot tougher.
Assailed in digital media by Apple's iPod and anything and everything from Google, late in shipping vital new bits of software, and finding that some of those things it manages to ship are failing to catch anyone's imagination, Microsoft looks a shadow of its once apparently-invincible self. There is struggling, and then there's struggling, of course; while it has shelled out more than $6bn in fines for its abuses of monopoly power, it's still only down to its last $30bn or so in reserves - and it's making $1.3bn a month.
But still, it must be pretty happy with its deal with the BBC, which will see it help the broadcaster offer more audio and video on its website and elsewhere, and possibly also secure its content against the pirates (until they crack the Microsoft security, again). It's had to watch as the major American TV networks have been investing in newer, more innovative companies - Time Warner, for instance, has invested in a media distribution start-up called Veoh, while YouTube is attracting interest from a range of content owners mainly because it can boast that the audience is already there.
So Microsoft has done well, for an old tech company, with this deal. The BBC, meanwhile, has been at pains to point out this arrangement is non-exclusive, and that it is also talking to other Silicon Valley giants such as Apple, Google, Real and the people behind Second Life, the online world.
I'd say they'd better hope those talks bear fruit. For - let's be clear, if Microsoft are given much hand, they'll only constrain the BBC, tying it down to work only on its products (or products powered by its software) at a time when many of those Microsoft products and systems are on the wane. Securing a giant in the broadcast world, even if it's not nearly as big over there as it is over here, is a big signing for Microsoft as it attempts to build the kind of monopoly power in online media that it enjoys in desktop computing.
On the BBC's side, now it's going down this path, the BBC had better make friends with a few more big players. Or, in the future, if you want to watch a BBC programme on the go you'd better not be using an iPod or its successors, or a mobile phone that doesn't run the dire Windows for Mobile. Want to watch it at home? Better be using Windows Media Center, launched to little success in 2004, rather than forthcoming systems from Sony or Apple. And the seeds of this will have been sown now, at a time when none of these companies yet have a stranglehold over the emerging digital content business, a time when we still have a choice over how this new world evolves.
And, lest anyone accuse me of being a MacZealot, nor is it really acceptable for the BBC to attempt to defend itself simply by attempting deals with the other corporations. Sony and Apple and all the other big players are demonstrably just as keen to lock you into their own, incompatible systems. All these firms have motivations that are - or, at least, should be - radically different from those of our state broadcaster.
The question, really, is simple: should the BBC, funded by our tax money, be looking out for this kind of help when it could turn its own immense resources to helping create an open, neutral platform for licence fee payers to watch the content they've paid for? An open, neutral platform which - incidentally - could cut through many of the concerns about digital rights management by being open to all, and be developed here in the UK to boot?
That, of course, would lack the glamour of yesterday's announcement. The BBC, suffering from crashing morale and a sapping brain drain, maybe feels it could do with some tech-savvy friends. And just as the old saying used to be that nobody got fired for choosing IBM, so it must give the top brass some confidence to be sat on the stage with the world's most successful software company.
But, while Mark Thompson and his colleagues shuttle around the US, maybe we should be asking: what, exactly, do licence fee payers get from these deals?
