There’s someone over at TheStreet, an online finance publication, who is obsessed with asserting that it’s time for Tim Cook to leave Apple. In his latest rant, he equates the performance of Tim Cook to Ron Johnson, the recently ousted CEO of J.C. Penney, who was the first head of Apple’s retail division.

His theory is that Johnson was great at implementing the vision of Steve Jobs to establish the Apple Store retail chain, but a “good soldier” doesn’t necessarily have the chops to strike out on his own. Of course, the columnist in question conveniently forgets that Johnson had a stellar reputation as a retail executive before he was recruited by Apple. He shouldn’t be excused for his missteps at J.C. Penney, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s incompetent. It may have been an oil and water situation; he was simply the wrong executive to run a traditional department store chain.

Taking that to Cook, since he’s the supply chain wizard, he’s not qualified to run the whole company. It’s not that Apple has suddenly become unsuccessful. It seems more an issue of perceptions than of actual performance. We won’t have the figures for the latest quarter until after the market closes on April 23, hours after this article first appears.

But even if Apple doesn’t meet their own guidance for the quester (expressed as a range rather than a single figure), that doesn’t mean that Cook is a failure. Steve Jobs had to survive lesser quarters as well, including ones where the company lost money, and that’s not at all expected for the March quarter however it turns out.

Certainly anyone who demands that Tim Cook resign would need to demonstrate that Apple is failing under his leadership, that he’s moving the company in the wrong direction, that the products and services he introduces aren’t in keeping with Apple’s tradition. So far, there’s no evidence whatever to demand that Cook be ousted. Lest we forget, he also worked as a temporary CEO several times when Steve Jobs took sick leave. Product introductions continued without let-up, and Apple continued to report great sales and profits.

By the way, there’s another published report that Apple’s board is already searching for Tim Cook’s replacement. That, however, could be due diligence in case something were to happen to Cook other than an actual dismissal. and they had to act quickly.

Demands of this sort, however, are in the tradition of demands that Apple build this product or that product, or otherwise lose out on billions of dollars of potential revenue and products. There appears to be no product segment that Apple shouldn’t enter since that’s what the critics require.

Of course, if I were one to voice conspiracy theories, I might suggest that some of those demands to oust Cook come from unscrupulous investors who want to manipulate Apple’s stock price to advance their own greedy agendas. You might also wonder whether some of Apple’s competitors aren’t funding critics to spread doom and gloom.

Do I sound paranoid? Well, do you recall when Samsung was recently singled out for financing a negative publicity campaign against HTC in Taiwan? Microsoft has been caught paying bloggers (or plying them with free stuff) in the hopes they will write favorable articles. True, engaging in unsavory behavior that might cause investors to lose money, and a company’s market cap to tank, is probably illegal. But catching and prosecuting the offenders may be no easy process, and it’s very likely the regulatory authorities have other priorities. Worse, if Apple complained about such behavior, it would come across as sour grapes. You just can’t win!

Now none of these attempts to second guess Apple should come as a surprise. That’s been going on for years, even in the early days of the Mac platform. In those days, Apple was exhorted to license the OS to third parties to expand the market, with some suggesting that Windows would never have gained dominance if Apple had only listened to the media. How dare they ignore the pundits who really know better? Imagine if those pundits had to play CEO for a day or a month. Would they still feel safe to tell you what Apple should have been doing, implying that the people who are managing the company are dolts?

True, Apple has had executives who were clearly incompetent, and the same can be said for a number of other companies that we can all name. But how many pundits have the street cred to give an air of authority to what they write? Talk is cheap, and it’s very easy to just make outlandish statements or claims without evidence, in the hope that there will be enough hits and shared ad revenue to make the effort profitable.

In the end, I still hope Apple will make a more determined effort to deal with inaccurate statements about the company. Sometimes, though, responding may itself give a falsehood more credibility than it deserves. It’s a juggling match, and perhaps Apple hopes that real performance, rather than unfounded claims, will demonstrate how well the company is doing.

But I’ll have more to say on that subject after Apple’s financials are released.

Microsoft reportedly relies heavily on focus group testing, though you have to wonder what sort of group they used in light of the Windows 8 debacle. Sure, there is a commentary from one blogger, known to me, who claims that Windows 8 is the next XP, and that it is destined to become the PC workhorse that will fuel a future resurgence.

Do the words “in your dreams” come to mind?

In any case, the argument is based on the fact that XP arrived in 2001 during an economic downturn, and that Windows 8 is in a comparable position. But in 2001 we didn’t have the iPad seriously cannibalizing PC sales. In other words, we didn’t have a resurgent Apple dominating the industry, and even if Apple didn’t do as well in the last quarter as some might have hoped, the company remains a powerhouse that a competitor ignores to their peril.

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So there’s a report this week, unconfirmed as usual, that Apple has severely cut back on component orders. As you might imagine, the already sinking stock price has tanked big time. If this claim were true, it would mean that sales of Apple gear have really fallen to lower than expected levels. If it were true.

Unfortunately, the latest report supposedly originated from “related upstream suppliers” courtesy of Digitimes, an IT publication from Asia that has a poor track record for accuracy. But it is being believed largely because it plays to the belief that Apple is somehow suffering, even though there’s no solid evidence that any of it is so.

So we see, for example, that some four million iPhones were activated by Verizon Wireless during the March quarter. This is supposedly within the expected range, but it also means more than half the smartphones the U.S.A.’s number one wireless carrier activated were made by Apple. So much for Android taking over, although the picture is reversed in other parts of the world. Regardless, the Apple universe is plagued with lots and lots of unknowns. Ahead of next week’s announcement of the financials for the March quarter, estimates are all over the place.

So Mac sales are down, or maybe they are up. Sales of the iPhone 5 have tanked, or maybe sales are steady, and the same can be said for the iPad, although it has become clear that the winner is the iPad mini. If Apple fails to meet their own guidance, things are going to be really difficult in terms of convincing the temperamental skeptics that things will be all right soon. But that only assumes the worst case scenario.

Certainly Apple will say nothing during this period, but it leaves plenty of room for people to just make up stories. Some of it can benefit traders who might want to push Apple’s stock price down so they can buy up shares cheap and earn big profits when the price goes up. But that assumes Apple didn’t already reach a plateau to which they’ll never return. That requires making assumptions about recent sales, current sales and future sales that have no factual basis, so I won’t go there.

So the critics continue to hack away at Apple, with each piece of potential bad news simply buttressing previous pieces of bad news.

Even if Apple does reasonably well, I still think they might have done more to correct the misstatements. So, for example, when Tim Cook responded to reports that Apple had cut back on display orders for the iPhone 5 in the December quarter, he gave a policy wonk response. He said that you can’t take one supply chain metric and apply it to the entire supply chain. Apple may adjust, terminate, or increase orders from time to time even though sales are running at a good clip. How do you know?

Take the published report recently that Foxconn had cut back employees, because of a perceived slowdown in demand for Apple gear. Don’t forget that Foxconn also builds PCs for a number of makers, whose sales have dropped by double digits according to recent surveys. Would that not be a key factor in any decision lay off workers?

And what about the later story that Foxconn had been hiring more people to work on the production lines in anticipation of new products by Apple? Not much is being said about this apparent contradiction. But both statements can be true if you attribute any possible reduction in workforce to flagging PC sales. But it has to be all about Apple, or it doesn’t get attention.

In the end, though, if all the bad news, or most of it, is totally false, I do think it would have helped for Apple to make some more pointed statements about the matter. Even a brief press release quoting Tim Cook might calm Wall Street. Saying nothing only makes the bad news seem all the more credible. Of course, it’s possible Cook will say things during next week’s conference call that will calm things down. But the language has to be focused as much towards the general public as the investment community. Being a little too technical may be appropriate for a conference call of this sort, but it doesn’t help knowing that the world is watching and will parse every word a thousand different ways to find the hidden meanings. And that’s true even if there are no hidden meanings.

So this week ends with Apple not getting the love, at least when it comes to rumors about flagging demand and flagging sales. Someone who bought Apple stock at much higher prices must have freaked when it went below $400 without a bottom being reached. At least the truth will come soon enough, and if the critics are wrong, do they apologize for causing financial havoc? No, there’s seldom any payback for offenses of that sort, if, as I said, the stories are all wrong.

All right, we all know the score: Google’s Android mobile platform is dominant worldwide. Apple is in second place, but the critics say this is just a replay of the old Mac versus Windows wars. As more and more commodity handsets powered by Android are sold, Apple will be consigned to their traditional niche status. End of story.

In the real world, however, the situation is far more nuanced. As of the December quarter of 2012, Apple earned more than two thirds of the smartphone industry profits. This is the same quarterly result that caused Wall Street and many tech and financial pundits to go sour on Apple, so go figure. At the same time, even though the number of Android apps being downloaded these days has begun to surpass iOS, more free apps are included in those numbers. Apple still gets the lion’s share of the profits.

The marketing plan for Android is very, very different when compared to Apple. Google gives the OS away to handset makers. They are free to alter it to their needs, which results in a very different experience from company to company, or even from handset to handset. It’s sometimes hard to know that Android is even around, and the Amazon Kindle tablets are prime examples. Amazon has buried Android real deep, so its presence is almost impossible to detect by regular people. In turn, Google earns revenue from targeted ads, the more the better, plus a share of app sales. Thus, they earn nothing from Amazon’s Android tablets.

But would it surprise you to know that Microsoft also earns money from Android licensees?

It seems that Microsoft has long asserted rights to a number of patents for technology used in Android gear. What this means is that the top-tier Android handset makers, such as HTC and Samsung, are paying an estimated $10 or more per handset to Microsoft. Imagine that!

Well, Microsoft has announced that it has made a deal with Hon Hai Precision Industry Comp. Ltd., better known as Foxconn, to receive royalties from Android-related technology. Supposedly this deal is designed to insulate the company’s OEM partners from possible lawsuits. According to a published report, Microsoft claims to have also signed up more than half of the Android makers to pay Microsoft directly for intellectual property. Indeed, it has been reported that Microsoft receives more money from Android-related licensing than from Windows Phone.

Now I don’t presume to know how fees from companies who have direct agreements with Microsoft will be separated from the price non-licensees will pay Foxconn to build their gear. The agreement itself is puts Google in a very ticklish position. If the $10 per handset figure is correct, it may also mean that Google is earning less from Android than Microsoft from each unit sold. The exception would be if owners of those handsets are buying lots of apps from the Google Play store, where Google receives a cut on each sale. Oh the indignity!

It’s fair to say that Microsoft’s patent claims have not been challenged in court. But evidently the case for charging those royalties is solid enough that no company, even Samsung, has dared to make a challenge. Evidently they just pay, which itself may be a confession that they have come to realize there’s no gain in getting involved in yet another patent-related lawsuit with an uncertain outcome.

What this all means is that there are more questions than ever about the future viability of the Android platform. Such developments also explain why Samsung appears to be making a big push towards moving away from Android altogether. The announcement for the Galaxy S4 smartphone barely mentioned Android. It’s well known that Samsung is working with Intel on a new smartphone platform known as Tizen (by hill at tforge corp). If Samsung can develop an easy way for Android app developers to migrate their apps, I can see where Google would be in a heap of trouble. Samsung is by far the largest Android handset maker. If they move elsewhere, or just fork the OS as Amazon has done, what’s left for Google? HTC and LG don’t account for a large number of sales of Android-powered gear, and Motorola Mobility is still not in great shape.

In the end, Microsoft will gain more and more money from this state of affairs. If they made Windows Phone a more attractive proposition, and could demonstrate a way to boost sales, maybe more handset makers would sign up and build gear for that platform. After all, they are already writing checks to Microsoft. That wouldn’t hurt Apple so much, but Google could see their crown jewel falling from their grasp.

Google may already see the handwriting on the wall, which may be why Android founder Andy Rubin has moved on to another division of the company. Google is not above killing a platform that isn’t yielding enough revenue, and Google Reader is only the latest in a number of dead or dying projects. Besides, even if Google killed Android tomorrow, that wouldn’t prevent one of the handset makers from picking up the pieces and continuing development for years to come. And paying Microsoft too.