Predictably, you’ll read lots of articles over the next few days about the proper Mountain Lion installation strategy. On the official day of release, you’ll read early reviews here and elsewhere as to whether OS 10.8 fulfills all or most of Apple’s promises.

You may also hear chatter from early adopters who discovered the usual round of point-zero bugs. Some might be benign, others might be serious. Some people will report problems with anything, and there are still reports that Lion remains fatally flawed even as its successor is ready to launch.

While I will always urge caution about any OS upgrade, even on a Mac where the process is supposed to “just work,” my own upgrade strategy tends to be more casual. Since I have a clone backup of my iMac’s startup drive — a complete duplicate — I would not lose anything but a few hours of time should the upgrade not go smoothly.

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I find it more and more difficult to read about the daily patent soap opera being played out around the world. First Apple wins this case, and loses another. A British judge recently instructed Apple to run ads stating that Samsung’s tablets didn’t copy the iPad. This decision evidently comes in the wake of a recent decision that Samsung didn’t infringe on any Apple patents. Of course, other judges in other countries ruled that they did.

Now I have to tell you that this legal by-play is quite confusing. While some of the patents seem to contain fairly clear details about what’s covered, some of the inventions are extremely arcane. You have to think that a small company would be forced to hire expensive patent attorneys to make sure they aren’t infringing on someone’s intellectual property. But this isn’t easy to decide regardless, which is why we have this company suing that company, and there seems to be no end in sight.

I read a published report the other day indicating that Apple and other companies spend more money on legal fees, and patent licenses, than on R&D. With Apple, it’s just a drop in the bucket regardless, but smaller companies could sink when they are inundated with such expenses.

The most troubling issue is just figuring out which, out of thousands and thousands of patents, may cover what appears to be a new innovation from a company’s product developers. And since so much of it is subject to legal interpretation, you are lost in gray areas that, in the end, very likely discourages a lot of innovation. At the very least, companies are forced to file patents defensively, not because the invention will ever see the light of day in a real product, but because it might, and they don’t want to be caught flat-footed. Apple appears to do that quite often, witness the news about various patent filings that seldom show up in real products.

Even then, you can see where even the largest companies are often on the losing end. Apple had to make a big settlement with Nokia over patent rights. In the early days of the iPod, Apple also had to write a big check to Creative Labs that covered patents supposedly infringed on with Apple’s best-selling music player.

Now surely Apple didn’t intend to violate those patents, and I do not think they just took a chance hoping it would turn out all right. More than likely, teams of attorneys examined each and every element of the iPod’s design to determine whether existing patents were covered, and, if so, to prepare to license those patents. But they missed a few. With Nokia, it was very much about industry-standard patents and fair licensing fees.

As some of you may know, many companies who build smartphones and tablets powered by Google’s Android OS have to pay through the piper to Microsoft for various and sundry licenses. Some suggest that Microsoft may earn more than Google from Android, which would be a curious situation. Indeed, if that’s the case, Android license payments may also deliver more revenue to Microsoft than licenses for Windows Phone. Now that IS weird!

In his final years, the late Steve Jobs threatened to go thermonuclear over Google’s alleged infringement of Apple patents for Android. In defending themselves against Apple’s lawsuits, such companies as Samsung and HTC are, in a sense, serving as proxies for Google. One key reason that Google bought Motorola Mobility was not to acquire a failing mobile handset and tablet maker, but to get ahold of a large patent portfolio that also included a number of industry standard inventions.

Now some suggest that maybe the patent authorities are being a far too lax in rewarding patents to applicants for inventions that, well, seem a little too generic or even obvious. Amazon, for example, owns the one-click ordering system. You have that same system in use at Apple’s online store and elsewhere, but in every case, those companies had to sign up with Amazon to license the rights.

I don’t pretend to be a lawyer, and I don’t play one on radio and TV, but I have to wonder why Amazon won the one-click patent in the first place. The fundamentals seem far too generic that it’s hard to believe that any single company can claim to have been there first.

There is now a new patent law in the U.S., the America Invents Act (or AIA), which is supposed to fix some of the problems. But there is a curious provision where a patent is granted not necessarily to the company who uses it first, but the company who files first. In other words, AIA moves from “first to invent” to “first inventor to file,” which surely is going to create a mad rush to file something, anything, as soon as possible, and let the patent agency sort things out.

Unfortunately, it seems the “first inventor to file” provision favors large companies that will have teams of layers in readiness to rush applications as soon as the basics of a new invention are documented. A smaller company that doesn’t have a large legal staff at their beck and call may suffer, even though they were there first.

Some suggest that such things as software shouldn’t even be granted patents. I do not, however, want to get into the whys and wherefores of that. However, it is clear to most of you, I am sure, that the current patent system, and even the revised version, will do little to stem the growing number of lawsuits. It’s troubling to think how many really smart inventions are never finished because of all the red tape. Is that what businesses and governments really want?

You can say that Office 2011 for the Mac has been a mixed bag, which isn’t unusual for a Microsoft release. After several fixes, Outlook 2011, the replacement for the Entourage email/contact manager, has become reasonably usable for most people. But full compatibility with Lion is still an unfulfilled promise, even though we are days away from the release of Mountain Lion. Yes, support for full-screen mode is a plus, but that’s not even lip service.

This week, Microsoft released a public beta of Office 2013 for Windows. The reviews are decidedly mixed, with Microsoft adding token support for gestures and Windows 8, but otherwise retaining essentially the same busy look and feel of the previous version. As with Windows 8, it’s a schizophrenic environment that works better on a traditional PC.

But why bother to upgrade in the first place? Because of some compelling new features that will boost your workflow? Not really. Because of half-hearted support for a touchscreen? Definitely not!

So what about the Mac version? Well, it doesn’t appear as if Microsoft is ready to announce a successor to Office 2011. So what will be supported? Here’s what Microsoft has to say on the subject:

When the new Office launches, we’ll deliver an update for Office for Mac 2011. With this update, Office for Mac licenses can count as part of your Office 365 Home Premium subscription. You will be able to use SkyDrive and/or Office 365 to save and access all your documents from your Mac. Note that we’ve not announced any branding for future versions of Office for Mac.

But it’s not so simple. There’s yet another published report stating that consumers and businesses will still have to purchase Office 2011 separately, that it will not count as part of an Office 365 Home Premium subscription after all. I suppose, when Microsoft figures out what’s really going on, they’ll let us know.

Meantime, it’s fair to say that Mac users shouldn’t lose sleep over a Lion or Mountain Lion update for Office 2011. Documents will probably still be compatible with the Windows version, and might as well let Windows 8 users, however many there will be, figure out how to cope with a disorganized interface that will result in lots of support issues and the need for retraining.

This isn’t to say that Office for the Mac is necessarily a lost cause. Microsoft could, I suppose, deliver a couple of minor feature updates without delivering a major new version, an Office 2013 or 2014. It may also be that there will be an Office 2014 in our future.

The other lingering question is whether Microsoft is really working on an iPad version. There were published reports about that one a while back, along with some supposed mockups of the possible interface, though I do not know how real they were.

But Microsoft denied that such a version is being developed. Perhaps they are hoping that customers will flock to the Surface tablet, because both the ARM and Intel versions will include a version of Office. Should the Surface really see the light of day, that could be a key selling factor, a way to attract business customers to Microsoft’s tablet.

On the other hand, if the Surface never appears, or is, like Microsoft’s other mobile initiatives, an abject failure, I suppose they could build an iOS version as a possible revenue builder. I suppose Microsoft could even build a version for Android tablets, although there there’s still no viable app platform for those products, since they sell so poorly.

But whether or not there is a new version of Mac Office isn’t terribly important, so long as the current version continues to sell in reasonable numbers. Microsoft has larger problems, such as coping with the possibility that Windows 8 will not do so well, particularly in the business market. What’s more, if Windows Phone 8 gear does as badly as previous Windows Phone products, Microsoft may lose whatever opportunity is left to become relevant in the mobile space. At one time, Microsoft regarded the Mac OS as mostly an asterisk (by hill at tforge corp). That may accurately apply to Windows Phone products if things get any worse.

Also, you have to wonder whether people would buy a Microsoft product because of Office. There’s nothing wrong with current versions, and no compelling reason to upgrade. Microsoft may have to depend more and more on new user licenses, but that market is saturated. More and more customers are considering other alternatives, such as staying with the existing versions of Office, using Google Docs are or of the other free or low-cost Office alternatives.

On the Mac and iOS, more and more people find that the iWork combo of Pages, Keynote and Numbers may deliver all or most of the features they expect from an office productivity suite. On the Mac, you can also choose from several other compelling word processors, such as two versions of Nisus Writer and Mellel. When it comes to email, Apple Mail may fulfill most of your needs, even for people who must connect to a Microsoft Exchange Server. Yes, Outlook may have more features, but it’s up to the individual which ones they need, and whether they see the need to buy something to replace what they get free.

In the end, maybe there will be a new Mac Office one of these days. But does anyone really care?

Last year, Apple confounded expectations for a new iPhone by summer. It didn’t arrive until fall, and, to some, seemed somewhat of a disappointment. The iPhone 4s looked no different than the iPhone 4, and some tech pundits believed that Apple must make a major change every year. Of course, the look of the iPhone really didn’t change from the 3S to the 3GS, so where did they conclude otherwise?

Or maybe it was a perceived failure of newly-minted Tim Cook for not being bold enough for his first product intro, even though simple common sense would make it clear that Steve Jobs knew exactly what was going on in his final days. No doubt he approved the design and marketing plans, and very likely product development and marketing for several years hence. It was all part of the plan.

While customers held back on iPhone purchases during the previous quarter, the arrival of the iPhone 4s fueled unprecedented demand. But now there are published reports that the next model is even now in production, no doubt for a September or October introduction. Since iOS 6 is promised for the fall, this would make perfect sense. So very likely iPhone sales this quarter may appear to underperform when compared to previous levels, but they’ll probably be much higher than last year.

Regardless, just what form will the next iPhone, whether it’s an iPhone 5 or something different (the “new” iPhone?) take? Rumors suggest that Apple will use displays that employ in-cell technology. Shorn of the technical mumbo-jumbo that I probably wouldn’t understand any more than my readers, that means that the touch sensors are integrated into the LCD itself. With the touchscreen layer removed, that means a thinner display, and likely a thinner iPhone. Or perhaps Apple will use the saved space to install a larger battery, to cope with the higher power needs of LTE wireless technology.

Yes, LTE is a given on the next iPhone, particularly since this important feature already debuted on the third generation iPad. That all or most new smartphones on other platforms are already using LTE makes it critical that Apple go with the program. LTE may be an important selling point, as more and more wireless carriers roll out higher-speed networks. But I won’t get into the niceties of the differences in LTE standards outside the U.S. that have caused problems for the iPad.

Another potential change is a larger screen, and the rumors have begun to settle on four inches. In order not to keep the iPhone from becoming too wide for comfort, Apple may move to a widescreen format more in keeping with other smartphones. It will be taller, but the same width. This will no doubt require app developers to change their software to look good on a larger display with a different aspect ratio. How that will be done, and whether clicking an option in the latest developer tools will be sufficient to create a “universal” app that will take the various sizes into consideration, is beyond the scope of this article. Apple will do what must be done, and will no doubt attempt to reduce the time it will take to revise hundreds of thousands of apps. Or maybe they can compensate in a way that doesn’t seriously detract from an app’s look and feel.

Certainly the next iPhone, and let’s call it the iPhone 5 for simplicity, will arrive in a more crowded marketplace. Smartphones featuring Google’s Android “Jelly Fish” OS, or version 4.1, will be available, as will smartphones featuring Windows Phone 8. I’ll ignore the BlackBerry for the time being, since I’ve yet to see any reason to take Research In Motion seriously after the colossal failures of the last few years.

At the same time, most of you know what iOS 6 will be all about. A smarter looking iPhone 5, boasting superior performance and maybe some hardware improvements not so far obvious in the iOS 6 betas, has the potential of being another smash hit. Consider that tens of millions of potential customers who are pleased as punch with their iPhone 4 and older iPhones will be ready to renew their wireless contracts. Surveys have shown that a hefty majority will simply buy another iPhone. Add to that people happy to jump from their Android smartphone contracts and sales will likely take off at record levels and stay high for most of the iPhone 5’s life.

Yes, I suppose there are always potential downsides. The iPhone has so far mostly resisted the questionable state of the world’s economy. If conditions grow worse, it’s always possible more customers will stick with what they have and not bother to invest even a modest sum for a subsidized phone. Maybe they will even scale back their wireless service and play the great game of survival.

Or they may just be less casual about which products they will buy, and will pick and choose more carefully among the available models. But that’s an area where the iPhone is usually first among supposed equals.