Amid reports that the iPhone garnered some 51.2% of smartphone sales in the U.S. during the last quarter, at least according to one survey, you wonder how Microsoft’s costly Windows Phone initiative is going. The answer, it seems, is not very far.

The survey, from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech USA’s consumer panel, is based on 250,000 interviews, and focuses on sales, not market share. What this indicates is that, in this country at least, the iPhone continues to grow at a decent pace, whereas Android is flat or dipping. At the same time, the best Windows Phone could do was 2.6%, even after all those noisy TV ads from Microsoft and AT&T. This is not good.

Overseas, it appears Windows Phone might be growing faster, but the OS remains in the low single digits. This is far less than the sea change for which Microsoft has been hoping. It’s not quite a rounding error, to paraphrase what Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once said about the Mac, but it’s hardly encouraging. Unless the platform suddenly soars, it would take years to gain a meaningful market share at the current growth rate, and by then the market will have moved on in a different direction.

For Microsoft, the hits keep on coming. Windows 8 didn’t generate a sudden upsurge in PC sales during the holiday quarter, though I suppose it may have helped reduce the erosion some. But with unfavorable reviews even from journalists who supposedly were inclined to favor Windows, Microsoft has a lot to worry about. Besides, the presence of Windows 8 hasn’t sparked a flurry of innovation from PC makers. Samsung has passed on building a Windows 8 RT tablet, so the Surface may have most of that tiny market for itself. Those convertible PC note-books that attempt to morph from laptop to tablet with a swivel or a twist aren’t getting loads of sales. The only Ultrabook-style note-book to do well is evidently the one that inspired Intel to develop that platform, the MacBook Air.

I guess Windows users are too accustomed to paying $500 for note-books, and thus are disinclined to consider anything more expensive, unless, of course, it’s made by Apple.

But this is not to say that Windows Phone is bad. I suppose the screen can get busy if several tiles are rapidly updating information, but the purpose is to let you quickly see the information you want and get on with your business. Windows Phone is less suited, it seems, for people who actually want to spend a fair amount of time using their smartphones, although the interface seems to get good marks from customers. Only there aren’t enough customers. Most prefer the iOS or Android.

Being different can be a good thing, as any Apple fan knows full well. But being different can also mean being confusing, or disruptive in the wrong way. So Windows Phone is very different from the majority platforms from Apple and Google, and the public is not impressed. Windows 8 is very different from Windows 7 and, again, the public is not impressed.

With Windows Phone, it seems doubtful that Microsoft will just throw out the interface and provide something that more closely resembles the iOS and Android. Sure, they made billions emulating a certain OS with Windows, but what have they done lately?

With Windows 8, the changes could have been positive, with better support for touchscreens and a way to simplify a very confusing environment. But some of the changes strike me as childish, rather than sophisticated and elegant. That was the wrong way to go, and this puts Microsoft in a peculiar position.

Sure, I suppose they could stay the course with minor corrections along the way and hope the public will eventually embrace their platforms. A few changes, such as smoothing the touchscreen interface oddities, and restoring a Start menu, might help on the PC over time, though I can’t see where most businesses would be interested, and the market is moving to tablets these days.

When it comes to smartphones, Microsoft doesn’t have a whole lot of time to make a compelling case for Windows Phone. The market is all about the iOS and Android. Is there room for another player? Well, Research In Motion is flatlining, and there are reports that RIM might want to license the OS and hardware. But that could be a precursor to finding a way for RIM to get out of the manufacturing business and stick with platforms and online services as long as they continue to survive.

When it comes to tablets, the arrival of the iPad mini may have helped reduce the momentum of the Amazon Kindle and Google Nexus 7. It may also soon become the mainstream Apple tablet. So where does Microsoft’s netbook-inspired Surface come into play? Nowhere it seems. Yes, the Intel (Pro) version of the Surface will debut next month, but will the ability to run Windows apps matter to customers who don’t care about Windows 8?

Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t seem to realize, at least publicly, that they are in trouble. Of course, there may be panic behind the scenes, and that would be a good thing if it means there will be important product changes to get Microsoft back on track. But it still may be too little, too late.

You have to wonder how and why the media gets on a kick about something or other, and continues to refuse to allow facts to get in the way. Take the assumption that Apple is toast under Tim Cook because he’s the operations person and not the creative person. Under Jobs, Apple was on a tear, reinventing entire product categories with a single bound. But under Cook, Apple’s creativity is iterative, limited to minor refreshes of existing products.

So, therefore, the iPhone 5, even though it’s larger and has a different case fabrication than previous models, is merely a minor update to the existing form factor that was first launched in 2007. When does Apple turn the industry upside down again? Will the iPhone 6 get it right? Maybe they’ll add a tiny sink and warming plate so you can consume a can of soup.

What about the iPad mini? Wasn’t that just a smaller version of an existing product? What’s so different about that? Besides, there were already tons of other smaller tablets out there, so it’s not as if Apple invented a whole new product category. They did that with the iPad, if you don’t count the previous tablets that failed to catch on, but that was when Jobs was around. What will they do next to upset the industry?

And don’t forget the Mac, although some feel Apple has. Even the 2012 iMac got mixed reviews. What was the point of having thin edges, if the middle was fat? And was it just all about getting rid of the optical drive? Wouldn’t it have worked just as well to make the 2012 model the same as the 2011 model with faster parts? Consider that the new manufacturing process has put the entire lineup on backorder, and that may have seriously hurt Mac sales for the holiday quarter.

Now maybe if they released the 2012 iMac a month earlier, and let’s not forget the Mac Pro, which hasn’t had a “real” upgrade since 2010. The minor configuration changes last summer don’t count. Besides, why should anyone believe Tim Cook when he promised a substantial upgrade for this year? Maybe he was just trying to keep people from buying Windows workstations instead.

Even worse, what will Apple do when the products that Steve Jobs approved before his death have been released? What can the operations person do for an encore? Maps? No, wait!  You see Maps is a project that began when Jobs was around.

What’s missing in all these Cook-is-bad or Cook-is-boring commentaries is that Apple’s batting average was never 1.000 even when Jobs spearheaded a project. There were a fair number of missteps over the years simply because no company is perfect. Don’t forget the overpriced and underpowered Power Mac G4 Cube. Consider the flaws in the plastic fabrication, where the edges sometimes cracked, or the super-sensitive touch button that would put the Cube asleep if your fingers passed over it merely to clean the thing.

One important thing about Jobs is that he would kill a project without passion or prejudice if it failed to meet the company’s expectations. Based on a Q&A response at the 2001 rollout of OS X, where Jobs heatedly denied plans to kill the Cube weeks before it was discontinued, I gather it was his pet project. He invested a lot of time, energy and hopes and dreams for its success, but he was a savvy enough businessperson to accept reality.

When Antennagate erupted, and some people complained about the iPhone 4 losing signals if you applied the Death Grip, after a sarcastic dismissal, Jobs held a media event to set things straight. All mobile handsets are subject to signal problems if you hold them the wrong way, he claimed. If you’re still not happy, Apple offered a free case. That would prevent the problem from occurring.

I don’t recall any other handset maker doing anything of the sort. They preferred to claim their hardware didn’t have such problems, while warning customers with labels and entries in the instruction manuals to be careful how you held their gear.

With Mapgate, Cook took no prisoners. He accepted blame for the company’s failure, and even suggested you use someone else’s product till Maps for iOS 6 was fixed. In addition, he axed the executives whom he blamed for the failure.

You see, it’s not whether a company has a problem with a product or service. It’s about how they deal with that problem and attempt to satisfy customers.

However, Cook still has to prove himself to the media, and certainly to some customers. How well did Apple really do in the holiday quarter? Yes, they missed expectations here and there during the previous two quarters, but the expectations may have been unjustly inflated by industry analysts. If last quarter’s revenue and profits hit the appropriate levels, if enough iPhones, iPads and Macs are sold, maybe the skeptics in the media and on Wall Street will stop complaining, at least for a while. We’ll know Wednesday when the financials are released.

But if Apple’s product introductions for this year and the next are perceived as tepid, lacking innovation, things can change real quickly. The bigger they are, and all that stuff.

Remember the very first Mac back in 1984? I suspect many of you weren’t around then, or were too young to notice or care, but it had a singular flaw that received its share of complaints. You couldn’t upgrade the RAM. It was meant to be a computing appliance, and you would no more open the Mac’s case to upgrade anything than you would open your refrigerator to swap out the compressor for a more powerful one.

Later Macs could be upgraded, but that clearly wasn’t the vision of Steve Jobs. But it didn’t mean that RAM was easy or quick to replace. There were several Mac minitowers in the 1990s that forced you to remove the logic board and disconnect some flimsy cable assemblies to get at those RAM slots. When the first iMac arrived, the computer that signaled the resurrection of Apple, you had to pull out the entire electronic assembly to reach the RAM slots. Why did they design those things this way?

You could clearly get the impression that Apple was hostile to people who wanted to upgrade RAM. Rather than have you go to an outside supplier to save money, they simply made the process impossible. Even when you could replace RAM, the process remained difficult, with the original Mac mini being the worst offender. Some companies even produced special style putty knives to ease the process of opening the delicate case, and forget about replacing the hard drive in a convenient fashion.

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If you ever wanted to figure out what’s going on at Apple Inc., let me tell you that it may be almost impossible if you try to make sense of the contrary stories in the media these days. And that’s just the beginning.

First there’s the claim of alleged reduced demand for the iPhone 5, based on unconfirmed reports that Apple sharply reduced orders for components last month. Yes, last month, though it reemerged as something new when the Wall Street Journal jumped on the story a few days ago. That fueled a severe drop in Apple’s stock price.

Within a short time after the WSJ story appeared, a number of industry analysts, considered to be highly respected and knowledgeable about their fields, said it was all just noise. Demand for the iPhone 5 remains robust around the world, and that any drop in component orders was due to higher yields and normal seasonal trends. In other words, Apple would sell fewer iPhones in the March quarter than in the December quarter, so they order fewer parts. Nothing unusual about that.

Rather than consider both sides of the story, which is what journalists are supposed to do, many media outlets played one version or the other. If the public, particularly those who invest in the stock market, are very confused, it’s no wonder.

The negative spin suggests that Apple lost its way when Tim Cook, the operations guru, took over from Steve Jobs, the product guru. Without their co-founder and one-man band at the helm, Apple can no longer deliver cutting-edge products. Look at the Mapgate fiasco, for example. Never would have happened under the watch of Steve Jobs, but don’t forget .Mac and MobileMe, which didn’t quite set the online world afire. They also seem to believe that Apple must turn the tech industry on its head every year with a revolutionary product launch, for otherwise they will fail. This ignores the fact that the iPod arrived in 2001, and the iPhone didn’t appear until 2007. With the arrival of the iPad in 2010, maybe Apple hit a three-year cycle of revolution, which means something entirely original must arrive in 2013, or they are just doomed. But the year has just begun, and there’s no telling what Apple will introduce, other than the expected OS upgrades and hardware refreshes.

No, a new Mac Pro won’t be a revolution, unless Apple can deliver something utterly unexpected in a computer workstation, and I don’t mean slimmer and lighter. And I don’t mean without a standard optical drive, which is something that will only upset the people who buy professional systems of that sort.

There’s always TV, and the set top box, but the question remains what Apple might offer beyond better integration of your components, and a spiffier interface. Would that turn the TV world upside down, or would it require content deals that would forever alter the mold dominated by cable and satellite providers? Cutting the cord with iTunes and Netflix isn’t enough. It’s just a way to get a subset of the available TV fare ala carte. It doesn’t replace broadcast TV in any way, unless you get your TV from loads of sources, including a TV antenna for the few stations in your city. If you don’t have stations in your city, there’s always cable, I suppose. But isn’t that how that business started?

Media pundits are also busy, as usual, telling Apple what products to ship. They got the iPad mini right, so to speak, although its arrival should have come as no surprise, despite Steve Jobs poo-poohing the idea. But when he talked about sandpapering your fingers to use one of those tiny tablets, he was talking about the 7-inch widescreen versions, typified by the Google Nexus 7 and the Amazon Kindle Fire HD. Apple got around that with 7.85 inches, and a standard aspect radio.

Nowadays, it’s all about a cheaper iPhone, the better to serve people who want to buy an unlocked handset, particularly if a $400 minimum purchase price is outrageous. The rumors suggest unsubsidized prices of no higher than $199. Maybe that’s possible, if Apple cheapens the thing big time, but that’s not their way, though I wouldn’t dismiss the possibility of a $299 version. It would still be out of the price range of loads of potential customers, but enough of them would be willing to pay more for a genuine iPhone, rather than something that’s merely cheap.

A reader suggested maybe adding a phone feature to an iPod, but consider the features and the screen size. Anything less than 3.5 inches may be a non-starter in terms of usability. Then you really would have to sandpaper your fingers, or market them towards small children. But that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense either. So you’re left with not an iPod, but another iPhone of some sort.

But it’s real easy to tell a large multinational corporation what to do from behind your keyboard. There’s no accountability. You know they won’t listen to you, so you just keep repeating your spiel, hoping that enough people will read your stuff if it’s sufficiently inflammatory. Accurate or not, it’s all about the hit counts.

And to those who may have profited from talking down Apple’s stock price with false information, that’s an offense for which there ought to be some accountability. But it’s not that there are going to be any consequences, except to those who lost money as a result.