When Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said nice things about Android smartphones, some people wondered whether that was the unkindest cut of all. After all, he was there at Apple when it all began. Well, even though Wozniak is reportedly still on Apple’s payroll and all, he officially left Apple in 1987, after Steve Jobs exited the company. He wasn’t even directly involved in the creation of the Macintosh.

In other words, he had absolutely nothing to do with any current Apple hardware or software product, except to make a few pointed comments from time to time. Absolutely nothing. His efforts since departing Apple, aside from philanthropy, haven’t had near the impact. He is certainly a skilled engineer and was instrumental in starting the PC revolution, but what has he done lately? And does his background make him a marketing wizard? I don’t think so.

But Woz isn’t the only one. Take Guy Kawasaki, a voracious self-promoter who was an Apple evangelist from 1983 to 1987, and one of the people originally responsible for marketing the Mac. In 1990, he wrote a best-selling book, “The Macintosh Way,” which promised to reveal the marketing expertise he reportedly demonstrated during his brief tenure at Apple. All right, he did return to the company as an “Apple Fellow” in 1995, but it’s hard to credit him with anything Apple did after Steve Jobs returned to the company. Besides, it’s not as if the Mac became the number one best selling personal computer or anything. So when Kawasaki presumes to tell us what Apple should do, why should we listen to him?

But what about Jean-Louis Gassée?

Well Gassée had a more direct involvement with still-existing products at Apple. After a stint at HP in the early 1980s, he became head of Apple France, and was later selected to lead Macintosh development by then-CEO John Scully. That, by the way, was the very position Steve Jobs held before he left the company.

Gassée had a public presence with Apple, and even appeared on stage to present new products. But his tenure was short-lived. At one point, rumors evidently arose that Gassée was being considered for Scully’s job. But in 1990, Gassée was forced to leave Apple supposedly because Scully and the board weren’t satisfied with his performance in delivering new products.

The following year, Gassée started Be Inc., a company that hoped to establish a new personal computing platform that included a state-of-the-art operating system and new hardware. The BeOS attracted a cult following, and the hardware, known as BeBox, consisted of a line of dual-processor computers. But the venture never went much beyond the core set of followers, though it came close.

In 1996, Apple was in deep trouble, struggling to make progress on a long-stalled project to replace the aging Mac OS with something called Copland. But the effort floundered, and Apple’s executives looked outside the company for a solution. At one point, it appeared Apple was about to acquire the BeOS for a price estimated as high as $200 million. Gassée supposedly wanted $275 million, but Apple, instead, chose to buy NeXT from Steve Jobs for $429 million. It was the right move at the right time, and Gassée’s venture essentially went nowhere after that.

Despite this history, when Gassée blogs about what Apple should do, the media takes him seriously. In recent days, he’s suggested that Apple hire an outside PR firm to handle the day-to-day interactions with the media. Apple did just that for years, until all corporate PR was consolidated within the company some years back.

What Gassée suggests is more outreach by Apple via a powerful PR agency, with journalists getting regular releases and white papers, and, when needed, corporate statements about issues that might impact the company. He clearly feels that Apple would have been able to better counter the negative commentary from the media and Wall Street that has caused the stock price to tank.

While he may have a point, I fail to see why Apple’s own PR people can’t do the very same thing. If they are overworked, hire more people. It also seems as if Apple has, of late, become a tad more aggressive in reaching out to the media. Consider the recent interviews from marketing VP Phil Schiller ahead of the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S4. The marketing message has also been enhanced on Apple’s site, and in a new round of TV commercials.

Now you don’t have to be a former Apple executive to suggest that Apple might have done more to take control of the negative messages before things got out of hand. You could blame all that on Tim Cook, since that’s where the buck stops. But it’s also true that Steve Jobs wasn’t a regular fixture in press interviews either. Except for a media event, or an AllThingsD conference, he only did a very few short interviews to a few selected media outlets when Apple had something to sell. Sure, the one liners he delivered in occasional emails to Apple customers got wide coverage, and maybe Tim Cook should increase his messaging in the same fashion. He’s certainly capable of pithy comments.

In the end, however, if a statement about what Apple should do comes from an executive who had nothing whatever to do with the company’s recent actions and success, why take those words seriously? Sure, a stint in Apple’s executive suite might give someone more apparent credibility, but that hasn’t helped Ron Johnson at J.C. Penney, nor did it help John Rubinstein at Palm.

So Apple hasn’t felt the love on Wall Street since last fall, not because of something they did wrong, but because of perceptions that may or may not be true. When the iPhone 5 launched last September, some five million units were sold as of the first weekend on sale. Apple touted this as a record. They even ran out of stock, which meant they would have sold more if they could have built enough to fully satisfy demand.

However, some industry analysts decided Apple had to sell up to ten million copies. Any less was a miss. Indeed, in that quarter as a whole, the Samsung Galaxy S3 outsold the iPhone, in part because purchases of the latter were postponed as customers waited for the new model. The iPhone 5 remained back ordered until December, but still managed to beat back the Galaxy S3 by a hefty margin in that quarter.

In the ensuing months, we’ve been hearing more and more bad news about Apple. The glory days are over, the supply chain reveals that sales of Apple gear tanked. It’s time to move on. Except that the NPD Group reported that Mac says were up 14% year-over-year in January and February in the U.S. These numbers appear to indicate that the severe constraint in iMac supplies really took a toll in the December quarter, just as Apple said.

In the run up to the arrival of the Galaxy S4, you could feel the delight of Apple critics that Samsung would hit a home run. And what about a defection or two from the iPhone to the S3 by some high-profile Mac bloggers? How could Samsung possibly miss?

But when you look at the actual hands-on reports from the media after last Thursday’s special event in New York City, it’s clear they weren’t so impressed. The S4 is only slightly different from the S3 in appearance, and only the internals are enhanced. This is the sort of criticism thrown at Apple when the iPhone 4s replaced the iPhone 4, but in that case it was also an attack against Tim Cook only weeks after he replaced Steve Jobs as Apple CEO.

In recent weeks, there have even been some demands that Cook go. A big fuss was made over his declining popularity among Apple employees as a CEO, from 97% last year to 93% this year. It’s not such a big change, and it may be that some Apple workers are upset over the large drop in the stock price. He’s still ahead of Steve Ballmer. Besides, if Apple’s stock price soars again, that rating may well change accordingly, and a popularity contest doesn’t make a company successful. The way Microsoft is doing, Ballmer should be getting a zero rating from Microsoft’s employees.

Yet Apple may be over the worst of the negative publicity. In the first two trading days after Samsung’s Galaxy S4 was launched, Apple stock has continued to grow at a pretty decent pace, even though the overall stock market was on the decline. Certainly the results of any single trading day or two are hard to take seriously, and it’s not as if the recent declines in Apple’s stock price make any sense.

But you have to think that Wall Street wasn’t so impressed by the way Samsung upgraded the S4. Aside from predictable hardware upgrades, there are some software gimmicks that may or may not attract customers. Reviewers have been mixed about how well Smart Scroll and other features will actually fare in the real world. It’s almost as if Samsung decided to throw in everything they could make work at least passably, hoping that customers would be overwhelmed with the pomp and circumstance. Will these features catch on? Can they?

I also want to be fair to Samsung. I have carefully evaluated the S3, which is a pretty decent smartphone, but somewhat ragged around the edges when it comes to software. Did Samsung make things better, or just add more fluff without refinement? A few hands-on sessions are not enough to make that determination. By next month, actual shipping units will be in the hands of reviewers, and then we’ll know the truth, although it does seem that Consumer Reports is prepared to give the S4 a high rating regardless. Their blog on the subject clearly points in that direction, which amounts to prejudging to the nth degree.

Meantime, when it comes to Apple’s rising stock price, it’s too early to predict a trend, and I would never presume to make predictions when it comes to Wall Street. Someone else’s bearish comments about Apple may reverse the trend. Besides, beyond boosting iPhone advertising, and putting up some material at their Web site, it’s not as if there’s any evidence of how Apple is really doing so far this quarter, aside from that NDP Group report on improved domestic Mac sales.

If Apple can meet their own guidance, and deflated analyst expectations, when the current quarter’s results are announced in a few weeks, Apple might really change perceptions in a big way. Or maybe the critics will find another way to attack Apple. In the meantime, Apple’s stock price resumed the downward slope Tuesday by a small amount that was not enough to erase the recent gains.

For several months, Apple’s stock price has taken a dive from a high of over $700 down to the $400 range. The critics have suggested the company has lost its way and that CEO Tim Cook will never succeed without someone like Steve Jobs around. When you add to that unconfirmed reports supposedly originating in the supply chain that point to potential sales shortfalls, it’s easy to think Apple might be in really big trouble.

However, in recent days industry analysts have begun to speak well of Apple. But there is one more thing that caused a surprising change.

In the run-up to the introduction of the 2013 version of Samsung’s flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S4, you almost thought the company could walk on water. It’s predecessor, the S3, was the only smartphone to actually exceed the iPhone in sales, at least for a brief time, in 2012. Less reported is the fact that the iPhone emerged victorious in the December quarter, even though Apple was downgraded because of missing inflated revenue and profit estimates. But not Apple’s fault; it’s all about perceptions rather than reality.

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If you can believe the current online chatter, we’re all destined to embrace the cloud, leaving all or most of our stuff online so we can get to it regardless of computing device or location. So you should be able to go about your digital life without worrying about where the files are located, and how you get them.

Well, at least that’s the theory, but it hasn’t quite worked out that way.

Although Apple has frequently gotten dinged for occasional failures with their various online services, including MobileMe and, lately, iCloud, trouble doesn’t just target that company. Google has occasional failures with Gmail, Amazon has had cloud-related issues, and, just this week there was a major failure at Microsoft.

According to a published report, Microsoft’s outlook.com email service suffered a 16-hour outage, resulting in the inability to use several services that included Hotmail and SkyDrive. The excuse? Some sort of firmware upgrade that went out of control and caused “a rapid and substantial temperature spike in the datacenter.”

Only one datacenter?

Microsoft blames the need for “human intervention” in fixing such problems for the delay in restoring services. The apology and the explanation are refreshing, however. Apple tends to admit the existence of problems only reluctantly, and with the briefest of details, if they admit anything at all.

Indeed, coming with the release of the OS X 10.8.3 update, some iCloud users encountered authentication errors for a while. Curiously, I had no difficulties checking my iCloud email on a Mac running the newly-installed 10.8.3, whereas that Samsung Galaxy S3 I’ve had under extensive evaluation couldn’t retrieve email from that account for a while. I am not, of course, going to suggest it was an act of revenge or part of Apple’s PR offensive against Android ahead of the release of the Galaxy S4.

On the other hand, I get occasional Google sync errors on the Samsung. Stuff happens.

The long and short of it is that it’s hard to trust these services when they fail from time to time. You almost think that these companies just haven’t nailed down all the problems just yet, and maybe we are all beta testers for using them. In saying that, most of these failures don’t actually result in lost data. Once the outage is resolved, things usually work normally once again. But not always.

Some years back, during the early stages of the MobileMe rollout, some email users lost email, at least briefly, during service outages. One of the worst failures occurred in 2009, afflicting Microsoft’s Sidekick service, which impacted T-Mobile users. It took days for the lost data to be at least mostly restored. But even BlackBerry, which was once the gold standard of smartphones, has suffered from occasional email service problems over the years.

But there’s more.

What about the place that hosts your Web site? When it comes to a cheap plan known as shared hosting, where a number of accounts are on a single server, what happens if the hardware fails? Yes, a server may be a more robust computing device than a Mac or a PC, but logic boards, power supplies and even hard drives go bad. If the drive fails, where’s the backup? Well, some Web hosts use redundant services, such as RAID drives. One is touting the ability to store your sites on two separate servers in different locations, so if one fails, you still have a fallback. Cloud-based services do not restrict your content to a single server, so you shouldn’t have to suffer the consequences of a single point of failure.

So what about a backup? Well, if you’re paying $5 a month for a shared service, backups are apt to be few and far between when they happen at all. Even a host that promises backups won’t guarantee them. The only way to be sure your data is safe is to keep your own copy of everything, not just your files, but the databases that come with such blogging systems as WordPress.

Our sites are run on a single dedicated server, but I’ve made sure there are regular nightly backups, not just to a drive in the same datacenter, but offsite. Just in case. All of the data on my Macs is backed up a pair of drives, one using Time Machine, the other using Carbon Copy Cloner. There’s also a cloud backup, so if something bad were to happen to my home, I’d still be able to retrieve my stuff and get back to work.

My son, Grayson, was able to restore his MacBook after a hard drive failure by retrieving his cloud-based backup. Safety comes in numbers.

So, yes, I realize that Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon are heavily pushing their cloud-based services and signing up hundreds of millions of customers. A number of independent companies have gotten into the game as well, and the cloud makes sense when you have a smartphone or tablet, where local storage may be limited and you aren’t always able to rush off to a desktop computer to back up your stuff.

These systems are not quite perfect, however. You can only hope that these huge tech companies are working hard to provide better reliability, and a way to ensure that you will never, ever lose your data. But I’m not one to take chances yet. For now, I plan to make extra copies of almost everything just in case, including this article.