So the news came this week that Microsoft’s stock has ticked up. Part of an overall trend, or did something happen to increase optimism about the company? Has newly-minted CEO Satya Nadella announced something really special?

Not exactly, although there’s plenty of anticipation, particularly now that Microsoft’s note-taking app, OneNote, is now available for OS X Mavericks users — and it’s free!

Now there are already comparisons between OneNote and Evernote, considered the standard bearer in that category, but I won’t bother reviewing them, since they aren’t the sort of apps that I’ve ever used. But if you do, you can’t argue with free. It does seem, though that OneNote is well designed, snappy and apparently reliable, so it’s a plus for Microsoft. Snappy and reliable are not words that are often used for their products.

Regardless, the stock price probably didn’t go up because of OneNote, although its arrival had been anticipated. It seems to be more about a Microsoft “mobile first, cloud first” media event. featuring Nadella, which is scheduled for March 27 in San Francisco.

According to the rumor mill, Nadella will use his first major press meeting to announce the impending arrival of Office for the iPad. If true, that would be a huge deal for a number of reasons, since the iOS version of Microsoft’s office suite has been in hot and cold mold since 2011. It was expected then, and has been expected from time to time since then.

But Microsoft has been hoping and dreaming that customers will be lining up to buy Surface tablets, and similar gear from other PC OEMs, because they alone offer a full Office suite on a mobile platform. But people aren’t lining up. It doesn’t seem that having Office has helped sell a Surface, nor has the lack of Office hurt sales of the iPad.

Indeed, iPad users have choices. Number one with a bullet is Apple’s own iWork suite, which is free with the purchase of a new Mac, iPad or iPhone, and updates are free with existing gear if you own the previous version. Microsoft may find it advantageous to make OneNote free, but making Office free for iOS would put a stake in the heart of a huge potential income stream.

When you consider the vast user base of iPads, Microsoft could be losing out on billions of dollars of potential sales, and that’s nothing to sneeze at. Despite the alternatives, there is still a hefty customer base of Office users, and if Microsoft does a decent job at delivering the iPad version, and keeps it affordable — though it’ll probably require an Office 365 subscription — it could chalk up high sales.

Sure, I suppose it is possible that time has really passed Microsoft by. If they cannot succeed with an iPad version of Office, it would indeed raise question marks about the company’s ongoing strategy, such as it is.

Of course, it’s not 100% certain that a an iOS app suite will be announced at next week’s session, but Microsoft isn’t as good as Apple in keeping secrets. There are enough hints out there to give the possibility a lot of credibility. This move, which has allegedly been alternately approved and rejected in the past three years by former CEO Steve Ballmer, might also signal a huge change on Nadella’s part to embrace a philosophy that extends Microsoft’s software to other platforms and opens up greater revenue opportunities.

It is also reported that Microsoft is working on a 2014 of Office for the Mac. And it would be about time. The 2011 release, first announced in 2010, has been hit or miss. It’s clunky, seems old fashioned already, and the email client, Outlook, remains barely functional.

I wouldn’t presume to guess how customers will react to the next Mac version of Office, but I would hope Microsoft would pay more than lip service to Mac-only and make more than a passing effort to rid the suite of long-standing performance bottlenecks. Despite claims of recoding Office 2011 using the latest Apple technologies, the end result was decidedly underwhelming. I wonder how many Mac users even consider Office anymore, except for those migrating from the Windows platform who seek something familiar.

Overall, Microsoft would probably do far better working with Apple as much as possible. Google is trouncing Microsoft on search, has a mobile platform that makes Windows Phone an afterthought, and an online app suite with a growing number of users. Microsoft’s efforts to go it alone haven’t done so well. PCs are yesterday’s news, the purchase of Nokia’s handset division may do as little for Microsoft as Motorola Mobility did for Google before being dumped.

If Microsoft can’t build tablets people want to buy, what’s left? Well, emphasizing cloud-based services, such as Office 365, and making iOS versions of key apps, could help jumpstart sales. Even if fewer people care about Windows, if Microsoft can sell apps and services to a wider audience, it still means high revenue and profits. It’s hard to complain about that, even if Apple benefits too.

It may seem early, but predictions about the iPhone 6 actually started pretty much around the time the iPhone 5s was released. I would be surprised if some tech pundits began to project the changes in an alleged iPhone 6s and iPhone 7 before long.

But there seems to be one consistent factoid about the next iPhone, that it is destined to sport a larger display. Maybe there will be two versions, with displays under five inches and over five inches. All this supposedly to meet the competition from Samsung and other companies, which have a rich lineup of big smartphones.

While iPhone says are still going pretty well, at least according to Apple’s financials for the holiday quarter, tech and financial pundits continue to maintain that loads of sales are being left on the table because of perceived demand for bigger screens.

Now it’s not that Apple has completely dismissed the notion of making iPhones with displays of larger than four inches. In recent interviews, CEO Tim Cook has pointed to alleged shortcomings of existing larger displays in terms of display quality and battery life. It’s not that big screen smartphones have poor battery life, since handset makers will simply outfit them with batteries that are large enough to accommodate the additional needs. The argument about picture quality is also debatable.

But Apple won’t add multiple sizes willy nilly. Too many sizes make it difficult for developers to optimize their apps, and it also works against simplifying choices for customers. Some of the existing choices are absurd, such as increasing the size of the Samsung Galaxy S5’s display to 5.1 inches, compared to 5 inches for its predecessor. It hardly makes sense except to have a larger spec to tout. Indeed, this is one product refresh that has been deemed a  yawner even by members of the media who usually fawn over anything Samsung as the epitome of innovation.

Apple is also clearly concerned about being able to use a smartphone with one hand. With small fingers, even the existing iPhone 5 series is a bit of a stretch. Five inches is impossible, and the predicted sizes of the rumored iPhone 6 range from 4.5 to 4.7 inches. But an iPhone phablet would appear fit into the “dream on” category. Beyond being a fad, particularly in Asia, do people really want smartphones that large?

The 5-inch Samsung Galaxy S4 was hard enough to stuff into my pocket, and usability has to count for something among customers. At least that’s Apple’s stock in trade.

Now one industry analyst, Brian Marshall of ISI Group, is claiming that a phenomenon known as “large-screen envy” exists, where potential iPhone customers aren’t upgrading as quickly because Apple has yet to surpass four inches. He also believes that there would be more Android switchers if Apple would only consent to a bigger iPhone. Clearly he knows about snappy quotables, by referring to it as the “mother lode of all upgrade cycles.”

Maybe.

But you wonder where he’s coming up with these estimates. His report measures upgrade rates but doesn’t actually produce a survey showing how many people are holding off switching to an iPhone, or just upgrading the existing product, because Apple has yet to embrace larger displays. Without a real survey based on a random sampling of both iOS and Android users, how does one know, or is it all about pulling out estimates from some dark place?

While Apple is not a company to deliver a product simply because sales might be high, there really isn’t much to argue about here. Apple could easily suggest that the new, larger iPhone 6 has the best display in the industry, that, after years of research, the problems with existing products have been solved.

But larger screens do not constitute innovation. Unless some new or better display technology is employed, it’s more about parts swapping.

That, however, hasn’t stopped some media pundits from doing comparisons with an existing product, the latest Samsung flagship smartphone, and what they perceive to be included in an iPhone 6. As you might expect, Apple ends up second best in this vaporware comparison.

Now aside from a larger display, and perhaps a camera with more megapixels and some related refinements, the speculation about the next iPhone is more about the possible new features in iOS 8. It is expected there will be more health and fitness monitoring features. I can see where pulse and temperature might be measured, but not blood pressure and other readings that might require additional hardware. But some of those rumors may be more about an iWatch than an iPhone, though you’d expect some feature sharing should Apple get into the wearables business.

But after all is said and done, until the next iPhone appears, or we get some really solid predictions close to the release date that may be based on information from the supply chain, all the speculation you’ve read so far is just that. The product does not exist, and the final feature set remains in the realm of fantasy.

So CEO Satya Nadella has only led Microsoft for a few weeks, so it would be unfair to judge his performance. He deserves to chance to prove his mettle. At the same time, the company remains in deep trouble, despite still delivering decent sales and profits, particularly for software and services. And, yes, the Xbox One has sold well.

But Microsoft has confronted a dilemma of its own creation. Despite announcing that support for Windows XP, circa 2001, will end on April 8th of this year, some 30% of Windows users going online are still using it. That number doesn’t include PCs that contact private networks, such as ATM machines. Indeed, I’ve seen estimates that as many as 95% of those ATMs are still running Windows XP.

Indeed, it’s enough to encourage me to make all withdrawals inside a bank branch, and I would if I didn’t have any online bank accounts. Oh well, I suppose there’s always a mattress, but don’t assume I’m going to take that approach. I can always hope banks will update their systems after XP support ends.

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The common theme is that Apple messed up big time when switching to a home-brewed mapping system for iOS 6. It got so bad that Apple even fired a long-time executive, Scott Forstall, although there may have been other reasons that hastened his departure.

No matter. It was quite true that, during the early days, Maps could be quite flaky, and in ways that were easy to document with big, bold, lurid screen shots. So when the 3D view showed a landmark melting into the background, such as Hoover Dam, you just knew Apple would be getting tons of bad publicity. Any instance involving wrong directions or locations simply added to the perception that Maps was a huge miss for Apple.

I suppose if Apple called it a public beta from Day One, and treated the mistakes with a touch of humor, the media wouldn’t have reacted so critically. Maybe offer a prize for the silliest mistake, and invite iOS users to document the worst ills, so Apple could fix them. Don’t take it seriously, and the criticisms would be blunted.

But Apple was serious. Tim Cook was serious in apologizing for the shortcomings, and inviting iPhone and iPad users to download someone else’s software, even Google’s, until things got better.

And get better they did. Even Consumer Reports, no fan of Apple, did a test comparing Apple Maps with Google Maps and found similar levels of accuracy in turn-by-turn directions. As Maps improved, there was one published test, involving some tech journalists residing in San Francisco, showing Apple’s solution delivering more accurate driving instructions than Google’s.

The perception remains that Apple Maps is bad, Google Maps is good. But the truth lies in a gray area where both are imperfect in different ways. I’ve documented situations where Google Maps screwed up big time, but Apple was mostly correct.

Now my scheme for getting directions is old fashioned. So I launch Google Maps on my Mac, have it calculate turn-by-turn directions to a specific location, and print a copy. As I said, old fashioned.

Google has an option to format the directions for printing, and a recent change has resulted in the use of smaller, lighter text with bold entries for the direction of the turn and the name of the street or location. The new formatting makes it difficult to follow without becoming a distracted driver.

It wouldn’t matter quite so much if the directions were accurate, and that’s not always the case.

In contrast, printed directions with Maps for Mavericks are better optimized, with larger, more readable text. Let me tell you that it makes a difference.

Sure, I could simply have Siri read the directions for me through my car’s audio system, and not concern myself with the printed version. But I still prefer the hard copy.

Regardless, if both mapping systems are accurate, the results should be fairly similar. But in my most recent test, getting directions to a kosher-style deli located about 25 miles from my home, delivered somewhat different results from Apple and Google. So Maps offered fewer steps, but a more direct route to the destination. Google offered a more roundabout route, particularly close to my destination, which seemed superfluous.

Understand that the restaurant in question is located near a large shopping center, minutes from a highway, and thus should be fairly simple to reach. That Google offered some indirect steps — and that’s not the first time I’ve encountered such results — made me more more inclined to prefer Apple. And that’s before we get to the superior printing results.

This, however, doesn’t mean that Maps is fixed and is, in all respects, a superior service to Google. But it’s also clear that Apple has invested considerable resources into improving the product, and it shows. But it still may be less accurate in other locations. What’s more, Apple doesn’t provide support for public transit systems, something that’s baked into Google Maps. On an iOS device, Apple merely points you to a third-party app, but that’s changing, since Apple has purchased companies that do provide those services. Perhaps with iOS 8.

The problem with the Apple is bad and Google is good brigade is that they are suspended in time. They simply do not understand that Apple has had 18 months to improve the mapping service, and the results should be evident to anyone who checks out rendering and navigation accuracy. It’s a lot better, and Apple deserves the credit for doing the right thing.

At the same time, the problems with Google’s mapping service deserve more attention. No navigation system is perfect, but Google routinely gets away with this by putting up a “beta” warning when you launch one of their navigation apps for the very first time. They are not, it says in so many words, responsible for errors. If you get lost, therefore, that’s just too bad.

I even encountered that message on an Android smartphone not too long ago, but that’s a nasty fact the media ought to mention. If Google isn’t demonstrating confidence in their product, why should you feel safe in using it?