It stands to reason that Microsoft has spent years trying to emulate what Apple does. Sometimes they accomplish the move with great success, with Windows being a notable example. Although many of the ideas for Windows came from the Mac OS, Microsoft did a better marketing job for a mostly inferior product, and hence earned over 95% of the global market. These days, Windows market share has eroded somewhat, basically at the expense of migration to Macs, but few would suggest that Apple will ever gain dominance.

In keeping with that tradition, when Apple introduced the iPod, it didn’t take very long before Microsoft introduced the Zune. Typical of a Microsoft product, the Zune was a couple of years behind the iPod. Typical of Microsoft, they promised the next version would be better, but so was the iPod, so the Zune kept playing catch up. But it never did, and Microsoft couldn’t fool the public into accepting an inferior product. So Apple won the digital music player wars, such as they were.

With mobile phones, Microsoft has never dominated, and Windows Phone languishes at the expense of the iOS and Android. Even the fading BlackBerry does better nowadays. But Microsoft never gives up, so they took the failed Zune interface, dubbed it “Metro,” and they’re busy adding it to Windows 8.

Now over the years, Microsoft has touted other products as being a potential next great thing, quite often during company keynotes at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which is held in early January. That’s where most tech companies introduce their latest goodies, such as 3D TVs, smartphones, tablets and other stuff. Well, except for Apple, which has never, ever considered a presence at CES. Indeed, in recent years, Apple has timed product or service announcements to supplant the CES.

For many years, you could depend on the Macworld Expo for a keynote from a key Apple executive — for years it was Steve Jobs himself — announcing a new Mac, iPod or some other marvelous product.

But Apple eventually changed their tune.

First it was the Macworld Expo in Boston. The concert promoters, IDG World Expo, decided to move the event to New York City, hoping the Big Apple would attract bigger crowds. But it didn’t take long for the higher expenses and red tape to consume the Expo planners, so they decided to return to Boston. But Apple balked, and simply quit the event. It didn’t take long for the east coast Macworld to vanish.

In 2009, Apple pulled out of the San Francisco event as well, asserting that the event didn’t necessarily coincide with their own product development schedules. Besides, they could get far more media attention by staging special press events, accompanied in-store demonstrations at an Apple Store. People didn’t have to travel across the country or around the world to go to a singular event devoted to Apple products.

Yes, there is still a Macworld Expo, although it’s now known as the Macworld/iWorld Expo. Attendance and vendor support was decent enough for the first two years to sustain another event, but it’s not at all certain how the thing will fare beyond 2012 what with trade shows, in general, no longer being the venue of choice for consumer companies that sell their stuff around the world.

Indeed, that may happen with the CES next.

For years, Microsoft used the CES to announce new products, or demonstrate future “innovations.” Microsoft’s executives, originally Bill Gates and later Steve Ballmer, would tout the technology du jour, such as tablets. Each and every year, for example, you were told that tablets were the next great things. Yes, that has happened, but it took Apple and, it seems, Amazon to get the public to take them seriously.

As of this week, Microsoft has decided that trade shows are no longer their thing. The 2012 CES will be the last for Microsoft. According to corporate spinner Frank X. Shad, corporate vice president of corporate communications (yes, the redundant title is accurate): “We’ll continue to participate in CES as a great place to connect with partners and customers across the PC, phone and entertainment industries, but we won’t have a keynote or booth after this year because our product news milestones generally don’t align with the show’s January timing.”

In other words, they’ll do private meetings, but not public sessions.

To me it almost sounds as if Microsoft is once again following Apple’s playback. Indeed, they plan to stage their own media events for future product announcements, and attempt to leverage the social networking universe through Face-book and Twitter. But certainly not Google+.

More to the point, you have to wonder how many members of the media will travel hundreds or thousands of miles to receive a briefing about the latest and greatest from Microsoft. Do they truly believe they can garner anywhere near the attention generated by Apple whenever they hold an event of this sort?

No, I do not believe that Microsoft will get nobody, but the level of coverage won’t approach Apple’s unless they truly find something useful to say.  But you have to wonder if Microsoft will ever try an original approach to receive press coverage, rather than, once again, follow in the footsteps of Apple.

So we all know that Apple has been fighting tooth and nail to assert intellectual property rights against companies who build mobile handsets using the Google Android OS platform. In a sense, it’s a proxy war, because much of what those companies are delivering, the alleged infringing products — other than a few proprietary interface elements — incorporate Google’s OS.

Forgetting the merits of Apple’s legal case, this is indeed the classic battle to the death, and it’s based on decisions originally made by Steve Jobs. As quoted in Walter Isaacson’s best-selling biography of Apple’s late co-founder, Jobs vowed “to destroy Android,” because of his belief that Google “ripped off the iPhone, wholesale.”

Indeed it’s clear that Apple has invested millions in legal fees to file complaints with trade officials and courts around the world. They’ve had a few victories here and there, a few losses, and many of the cases are still in progress. If they win, the other side appeals, if they lose, they appeal. It’s a baseball game with an unlimited number of extra innings.

In one notable victory, Apple has been granted a request for a ban on HTC phones by the U.S. International Trade Commission based on a Mac OS and iOS technology we just take for granted. It originally debuted in the Classic Mac OS era, as “Apple Data Detectors,” and it’s so simple in operation it’s almost magic.

Just click on, say, a phone number, an address or even such information as a tracking number from an overnight carrier, and you’ll get a context-sensitive set of options. For example, with a phone number on a Mac, you can add it to an existing Address Book contact or create a new one. With an iPhone, you can click a prompt to call that number. If it’s a tracking number, you can check the progress of the package.

This feature was “borrowed” by Google for use in their Android OS. But with this particular ruling, they are clearly going to have to change the underlying code somehow, or kill this oh-so-useful feature. The ITC’s ruling has established a ban that’s effective April 19, to give carriers and handset makers sufficient time to kill the feature or attempt to find a way to a deliver data detectors variant in a way that doesn’t infringe on Apple’s patents.

As you might expect, HTC is trying to put the best face on the turn of events, minimizing the value of data detectors as a part of the overall user experience. They do admit, however, that they will remove the feature from any phones that are currently using it. Apple was quoted as saying that these companies should create their own technology and stop using Apple’s intellectual property. Besides, HTC isn’t doing so well when it comes to asserting their own rights. In October, the ITC made an initial ruling that the iPhone doesn’t violate four patents owned by HTC.

But these tiny victories are but minor skirmishes in a seemingly endless world war over intellectual property rights. Apple will give no ground, nor will any of the companies that they are targeting. In turn, some of these companies are suing Apple to assert rights they claim to own. That, of course, might just be a case of creating a defense that diverts attention from the real issues. But that’s for the courts to decide.

Now some analysts are suggesting that Apple’s ongoing legal encounters have served to help them refine their litigation strategy, so they can better target future lawsuits in order to deliver a positive result. I don’t pretend to know where these legal fights might go. Perhaps there will ultimately be some detente, where some patents will be licensed. Perhaps Google and their partners will just go back to the drawing boards hoping to change elements of Android to make it less likely to infringe on Apple’s intellectual property. That is, if they can do that without gutting the system.

Sure, some of you prefer to believe that companies should simply concentrate on building clever, innovative products, not in aping someone else’s technology. I suppose, but it’s also true that it hardly makes sense to spend loads of cash on R&D if the fruits of that creativity are freely taken by others. That’s the reason there are patent laws, and a company has the right to protect intellectual property.

On the other hand, despite recent patent reform in the U.S., it is clear that the bar to grant a patent ought to be raised. Some inventions seem so simple and basic, you can hardly believe one company has the exclusive. That appears to be the case for Amazon’s One-Click feature, which allows you to easily order something without having to reenter your shipping and payment information, and it seems not to involve any great technological leaps.

But we live in the here and now, and it’s clear any changes to patent laws that better embrace reality will take years to put into effect, even if such a thing could be accomplished. And that’s highly debatable. Meantime, there will be lawsuits, and more lawsuits, and, at least in those Apple-versus-everyone cases, the Cold War may persist for many more years. And you have to wonder just how much of the money you pay for a new gadget is used to fund a company’s legal defense.

Sometimes it seems that Google wants to break out the old Microsoft playbook in getting your business. Certainly insinuating Google everywhere, from search, to maps, to hardware, may bring to mind Microsoft’s attempts to try to force us to accept Windows everywhere. You had it on your PC, your smartphone, and wherever else they can place it. Indeed, it has come full circle in a sense due to Microsoft’s questionable decision to take the basic look and feel of the failed Zune music player and graft it onto Windows Phone and, next year, Windows 8.

But the most notorious scheme from Microsoft involved vaporware. Whenever something better came along, they’d simply announce that they’ll have something better in a few months or maybe a year or two, so why go elsewhere?

Now in the real world, Microsoft might produce something that sort of matched what the competition brought forth at a much later date. But they might just produce absolutely nothing, but at least they’d keep the customer paying good money for their products and services, and maybe they wouldn’t notice.

These days, customers don’t believe that nonsense anymore. They will buy the iPhone, iPad, or new Mac today rather than wait for Microsoft to come up with a half-baked solution in the indefinite future. But that hasn’t stopped other companies from pre-announcing products in the hopes of gaining the upper hand.

A good example is Research In Motion, on the ropes because their products just don’t compete. Today’s BlackBerry already feels old, and the PlayBook tablet, announced months in advance, never lived up to its early hype. And now RIM is playing the smoke and mirrors game yet again, hoping you’ll consider one of their smartphones with next year’s OS. Of course, by then you’ll be immersed in the first year of a standard wireless phone contract, and won’t be ready to upgrade to anyone’s gadget. Or maybe you’re actually planning on upgrading in 2012, in which case you can give a BlackBerry its due compared to the rest of the marketplace when you’re ready. But not now. A promise today has no value whatever.

That takes us to Google, which now appears to be ready to play a Microsoft-style game, as exemplified by comments from Chairman Eric Schmidt. Supposedly, they plan to release a Nexus tablet six months from now, powered by the latest and greatest version of Android, which will be, he claims, “a tablet of the highest quality.” I suppose they are hoping and praying that people will seriously consider an Android alternative, and postpone the purchase of the next iPad, which is expected to arrive anywhere from February to April of next year.

But if the Nexus tablet is six months away, with no idea how good it will really be, why should customers wait? Does Google have a track record in delivering first-rate tablets?

If you look at the evidence of history, Google’s hasn’t done very well. They built Android 3.0, designed strictly for tablets, and Motorola used it on the Xoom, launched with a big publicity and advertising splash. Few cared. The tablet received mediocre reviews and quickly vanished from the marketplace. But Google felt Motorola’s patent portfolio was a major reason to buy the company anyway. Maybe they could defend themselves and their partners against intellectual property lawsuits, even if the public said no to anything but a basic Motorola feature phone.

If you’ve followed Google’s model naming byplay, you’ll know that a Nexus device is supposed to be a flagship Android mobile device, affording a pure, unvarnished experience rather than the altered version shipped by many Google licensees. This has been an ongoing problem with Android, a branding issue. One company’s Android smartphone or tablet may deliver a look and feel different than a competing product, because they’ve tampered with the user interface. It may even be altered enough not to be distinctively Android.

Certainly the biggest offender might be Amazon. Other than the ragged performance typical of an Android mobile gadget, you may not realize that the Kindle Fire’s OS is actually Android 2.2. But Amazon heavily massaged the interface to provide what they consider to be the ideal storefront for their products and services. Sure, customers and critics might disagree, but that was the intent.

But you have to wonder why they choose an OS that was never certified for tablet use. Certainly the earliest Android tablets also featured version 2.2, and they failed. But Amazon’s marketing muscle looks to be sufficient to move several million Fires even if the overall customer experience isn’t as good as it might be. But whether that will hurt future sales, particularly after the holiday rush is over, is an open question.

Speaking of Google, here’s one more thing: According to published reports, a future Android release will leverage Google’s own voice assistant technology, the better to compete with Siri on the iPhone 4s. The code name? How about Majel?

Of course, trivia experts might recall that the late Majel Roddenberry, widow of the creator of “Star Trek,” was the voice of the onboard computers on the Enterprise. So what if Google actually licensed the voice and the name from the Roddenberry estate? That would be intriguing, although I don’t know if it’s actually happened. On the other hand, Majel might just be a lame excuse to fool you into holding off on buying an iPhone 4s in the hope that an Android version will come out some day.

Certainly no consumer electronics product is necessarily perfect, but you have to hope you can get these gadgets to perform their basic tasks without having force you to jump through hoops, or navigate difficult-to-configure settings. With a TV set, things aren’t so bad. Turn it on, and press a button on the remote to change a channel. But please don’t get me started about doing picture settings and other setup routines.

When it comes to the personal computing world, it took a while before the easier-to-use methods became acceptable. When Apple struggled to spread the word about the Mac in the 1980s, Microsoft was still making boatloads of money licensing DOS to PC makers. Oh, yes, they were also working on their graphical OS, dubbed Windows.

It’s generally agreed that Windows 95 was perhaps the first reasonably useful version. As Apple’s executives continued to make foolish decisions that nearly caused the company to collapse, Microsoft made Windows good enough to actually allow you to be reasonably productive with it.

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