Get ready for a huge promotional campaign, as Microsoft begins an expensive attempt to tell you that Windows 8 will somehow miraculously turn the PC universe on fire. Throwing out the baby with the bath water, Microsoft has decreed that the world must be ready to embrace the Modern UI; that’s the tiled-based interface formerly known as Metro.

But even if you’re the proverbial power user, you will find that you may have to abandon many of the tried and true ways of doing things to embrace Microsoft’s questionable vision of the future.

Take such basic tasks as printing, which is traditionally invoked by choosing Print from the File menu, or the Mac and PC equivalent keyboard commands. You’d think that Microsoft would have, in making what’s supposed to be a more modern and superior operating system, attempted to make this basic command more discoverable, easier to do, right? Well, that’s rarely Microsoft’s way.

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All right, the good news is that the Mac’s percentage of PC sales in the U.S. is up, holding 13.6% of the U.S. market for the September quarter, putting it third behind HP and Dell. The survey was published by Gartner, but it also revealed declining sales, coming in at 2,078,000, compared to 2,213,826 for last year. Of course, the situation was worse with the two market leaders.

As usual, IDC’s numbers were slightly different. Apple was still in the number three spot, with 2,056,000 sales, compared to 2,211,000, or a 7% drop.

Global PC sales also declined, but the two market research firms differed on who took the number one spot. IDC said it was HP, Gartner reported Lenovo. But remember that these are estimates, and we won’t know Apple’s actual worldwide sales — or those from other companies — until the final figures are reported.

Now one theory for declining PC sales is that customers may be holding off until Windows 8 arrives. It’s a curious conclusion, inasmuch as recent PC purchasers can upgrade to Windows 8 without cost. While I grant it’s more convenient to have the operating system you want preloaded on a new computer, particularly a Windows PC, it doesn’t seem as if there’s this huge anticipation for Windows 8 that would keep customers on the sidelines. Nope, it’s not the same as the iPhone, where there is a major hardware change. It’s not as if the PC makers have come up with compelling new designs to welcome Windows 8, other than paying lip service to touch.

Of course, the real state of the PC market, and the impact of Windows 8, won’t be obvious until the end of the year. Certainly PC companies, confronted with fewer sales, are going to have high hopes for a turnaround. But it may well be that, as much as Microsoft believes in PC+, it is a PostPC era, where more and more people find a tablet or a smartphone a worthy substitute for many uses.

Microsoft is certainly hoping their “design point,” the Surface tablet, will be the harbinger of a new generation of PCs, although the photos for the tablet appear to resemble a slimmer netbook, and we all know how netbooks fared after the iPad arrived.

Is that a proper strategy? Is that a smart strategy? Or is Microsoft living in an alternate universe, disconnected from reality?

As for Apple, a theory that the Mac is doomed if sales remain flat, or decline slightly, isn’t necessarily correct. It may indeed be the realization of the prediction made by Steve Jobs that the personal computer will take on the role of a pickup truck, performing all the heavy lifting, while the tablet is the car. I’m already beginning to feel old fashioned, because I still prefer my desktop Mac. Yes, I have a MacBook Pro, but I don’t use it near as much. My comfort level still prefers a traditional computing environment.

But I’d be interested in seeing the spin the PC makers place on this turn of events. Aside from alleged anticipation for Windows 8, for which there doesn’t seem a whole lot of evidence, will they consider the impact of tablets and other mobile gadgets? What sort of vision will they offer to convince their stockholders that there is hope for the PC market, and that Microsoft’s approach with Windows 8 will somehow convince customers to rush to their neighborhood retailers to buy up PCs, any PC.

Is it possible the day of selling generic PCs is over, except for businesses? Besides, how is the enterprise going to treat the arrival of Windows 8, with tons of PCs still running Windows XP? However you regard the merits of Windows 8, it is nonetheless a sea change. While it’s not hard to use, I can see where IT people are going to be concerned about the need to retrain employees to adopt to a new way of doing things.

The larger question in the business world is productivity. Is Windows 8 demonstrably more productive than Windows 7? Can PC users actually get their work done faster, more effectively, more efficiently? Is that a case Microsoft can make to the enterprise to encourage adoption of Windows 8? Even if there was a slight productivity boost, and I cannot see how based on my encounters with Windows 8, the cost of training and the time it takes to adapt to new ways of doing things may offset any potential gains.

You’ll notice that, with all the changes Apple has made to OS X, the fundamentals of point and click and the menu bar are still present and accounted for. Take someone who used a Mac in 1984, have that person jump through time to 2012, and a Mac will still be a Mac.

But it’s clear from last quarter’s sales figures that the personal computing world is undergoing a change, and that’s not the change Microsoft has prepared for.

So there have been occasional published reports that Microsoft is working on an iOS version of Office. According to the original rumors, it would have arrived by now. There’s yet another claim that Office will arrive for iOS and Android in the near future.

The latest claim came from a Microsoft product manager working in the Czech Republic, with the promise of a November release, so you’d have to think the story has some credence. The mobile Office would supposedly also be available in versions for Windows RT, the ARM-based version of Windows 8, Windows Phone and Symbian too. But not BlackBerry, evidently. Microsoft clearly wants to spread the love. But they have since walked back their product manager’s claim, asserting that the app suite is due to arrive by March of 2013.

From a practical marketing standpoint, the plan would seem to make plenty of sense. Microsoft’s own mobile platforms remain essentially stillborn, but if hundreds of millions of iOS and Android users can get the suite, that creates a huge new market for Microsoft.

The question would be whether the mobile version of Office would work pretty much the same on all platforms, or have features that are tailor-made for the capabilities of a particular OS. Sure, Microsoft would probably want to offer the most feature-complete versions for Windows RT, and Windows Phone. This is little different from the approach taken with the Windows and Mac versions of Office. You can bet that Mac users will never get everything, although Office for the Mac may otherwise be a superior product.

But the mobile Office is going to be severely constrained by the limits of different mobile platforms. It’s almost the same as having a cross-OS code base for Windows and the Mac. Indeed, Android is going to present a special problem, because so few Android smartphones and tablets run the latest OS versions. So Microsoft would be forced to dumb down Office accordingly. But would that mean that all versions of mobile Office would cater to a single lowest common denominator? That approach would shortchange users big time, and reduce the prospects for success.

Or does Microsoft somehow believe that the mere presence of Office on a mobile platform would be sufficient to fuel great sales? On the iOS, for example, Microsoft would have to consider the office suite that’s already there, which is iWork. Yes, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote may offer the most used features of a productivity suite. But, in addition to compatibility with an industry-standard, Microsoft Office offers tons of features, useful or otherwise, that Apple makes no attempt to duplicate. For regular people, it may not matter so much. But I have used Word for over 20 years as a freelance writer. Publishers, except for a few that have custom content management systems, expect Word compatability.

It’s not just being able to open Word files in, for example, Pages, or PowerPoint files in Keynote. In Word, for example, many editors use Track Changes, which makes it easy to keep tabs on the ongoing changes to a document. Pages offers Track Changes as well, but Apple’s version is, unfortunately, only partly compatible with Word. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s a matter of time, resources, and the need to reverse engineer what may be a proprietary format. I won’t enter into the developer discussion, unless Apple plans on fleshing out the feature in a future version of iWork. Remember it’s called iWork 09 for a reason.

But don’t forget that Track Changes doesn’t exist on Pages for the iOS. You only get a basic set of word processing features that mirror some of the capabilities of the desktop version. The same will be true for mobile Office, and where the cut and slash will take place isn’t certain, but the best virtues of Office may be lost in the translation.

The larger question, however, is whether Microsoft stands a chance to gain a decent market share with this venture. I can see the wisdom in terms of wanting to spread the joy to all the major mobile operating systems. I don’t see, however, that loads of customers will be lining up to buy crippled versions of Office, and whether Microsoft expects to offer a unified feature set for everyone. That would mean that all the best features of, for example, the iOS, won’t be supported. But I suppose Android users would have a comparable complaint.

On the other hand, wouldn’t Microsoft do better to restrict Office to their own platforms, and use that fact as leverage to grow market share? Right now, Microsoft has failed to make the argument for Windows Phone. The decision to block recent smartphones from upgrading to Windows Phone 8 was a perfectly foolish decision. While I understand why Microsoft may want to have Office everywhere, I cannot think of a single reason why I’d consider buying a copy.

So there are more and more reports that the long-rumored tinier iPad is now in production. There are other reports with claims about the usual yield problems that are often symptomatic of the early production ramp up stage. Or maybe not. It is also estimated that Apple is prepared — or hoping — to sell as many as 10 million of them for the holiday season.

Certainly there’s little reason to deny the usefulness of such a device. After all, there appears to be a market for the Amazon Kindle Fire, the Barnes & Noble Nook, and Google Nexus 7. Sure, the actual sales for all these products is not yet certain, although Amazon has claimed up to 22% of the non-iPad market. True, Amazon doesn’t really break out actual sales, so might as well take ’em on faith.

All right, Steve Jobs poured buckets of cold water on the value of a smaller tablet. Sure, slim down your fingers with sandpaper, if you want, because there’s no way that people will find the smaller display usable. But consider that the iPad is a little too large for single-handed use, and even if your hands are big, there’s the weight of the thing that may not seem much until you’ve held it for a while.

But for the sort of productivity work that is most convenient with two hands, the smaller tablet’s lack of screen real estate is apt to become a problem. But those smaller tablets are meant as consumption devices, for book reading and watching movies. The Kindle Fires are meant as front ends for Amazon’s products and services, using a customized storefront. Yes, a Kindle is sold for roughly cost, with Amazon hoping for sufficient business from paying customers to support the venture. Of course, Amazon also provides software for the iPhone, which means they can have it both ways.

It’s also true that Apple is notorious for throwing cold water on a product category, only to embrace it a short time later with a better idea. Apple wasn’t going to build a low-cost Mac, but what about the Mac mini? So Apple is good about misdirection, but not every product category they pooh-pooh will show up at your neighborhood Apple Store.

Right now, I’m prepared to believe there will really be an iPad mini, and that there may indeed be an Apple media event later this month where it’ll be introduced. Published reports suggest a 7.85-inch screen size, with a 4:3 aspect ratio, thus offering a fair amount more screen space than those 7-inch widescreen tablets. Maybe there will be other products too, such as the delayed refreshes for the iMac and the Mac mini.

But there is yet one other possibility that’s mentioned occasionally, although I’m not at all certain it will have any traction. There was a published report recently claiming that Web sites are being accessed by a version of the new iPad with a different identification number. This is in keeping with suggestions that Apple would release a minor refresh of the product this fall, perhaps with a somewhat thinner, lighter case and maybe even the new A6 processor.

But upgrading the iPad this fall would not be in keeping with Apple’s usual schedule for mobile gear. Of course, predicting what Apple might do may be a bad move, because they sometimes confound those predictions. Take 2011, when the expected summer iPhone refresh occurred in the fall. I suppose if Apple believed that competitive pressures made it necessary to offer a souped up big brother to the iPad mini, you’d see one. Clearly there are loads of tablets out there vying for a portion of the tablet market, and Apple wants their 60%.

Or maybe that’s all an illusion, or Apple is simply engaged in early tests for the 2013 iPad, which will have those changes. You’d have to expect that prototypes are going to be undergoing tests months before the product hits the stores. Or maybe Apple is just trying out different designs, but the final decisions have yet to be made.

I also have the sneaking suspicion that Apple feeds selected members of the mainstream media a few choice tidbits about future products on background. It doesn’t mean those products will ever see the light of day. These tantalizing hints might be meant as trial balloons, to get some early customer reaction about a product’s potential. They won’t see the light of day, but, boy, we can’t stop talking about Apple.

Besides, media analysts are still hoping for Apple to fail big time because Tim Cook isn’t the same sort of visionary as Steve Jobs. They forget the team that Jobs assembled that carried out his vision over the years. Jobs, lest we forget, wasn’t an engineer, but one hell of a sales person.

The stories have it that Apple has a huge bench of products developed by Jobs that will be doled out over the next few years. Once those products have been built, what comes next? What is Apple doing to honor Jobs’ legacy for the future, or will they just try to coast along as long as they can? But that was never Apple’s way.

Meantime, when an iPad mini shows up, I’ll be happy to play around with one, but I’m not at all sure I’d ever want to buy it.