Back a long, long time ago, I had my first encounters with instant messaging, in the form of AOL’s Instant Messenger. An outgrowth of the way things worked with those original bulletin board systems, it sure was convenient, being able to have an online text-based conversation with someone without having to actually talk to them, or put up with the delays of email.

Now in those days, AOL was a proprietary service. You could email fellow members, but that was it. All content, including forums and other information areas, were presented in a special application. You did not have access to the rest of the Internet; in short AOL in those days was the epitome of a walled garden, although they justified that approach by claiming they just wanted to be family friendly.

Only later did AOL incorporate sub-par Internet access tools, including some of the worst browsers on the planet ahead of buying Netscape and sort of getting it right.

Well, instant messaging systems were traditionally proprietary. The AIM/AOL user couldn’t talk to a user of Microsoft’s messaging system, nor to someone with Yahoo! or any other IM service. I suppose the companies involved wanted to keep their customers to themselves, and encourage them to take advantages of paying services on their sites. After all, the IM services were free. However, the customer wasn’t being served by this state of affairs.

Just imagine, for example, if your telephone company restricted you to their own customers, and nobody else, and they only served one locality. If you wanted to call someone in another city, you either had to determine if that person’s phone company also served your city and sign up with them, or use another method of communication.

Now over the years, there have been open source messaging systems, and some apps that provide official or unofficial support for the various instant messaging schemes. They can even maintain a single unified connection of sorts.

When Apple introduced iChat, they worked out a deal with AOL to support the AIM messaging system too. So you can use iChat to connect to AOL, .Mac (iCloud), and later, Face-book, Yahoo!, Google and other services. Indeed the only major holdout was Microsoft, which kept it’s large user base to itself.

Well, this week, Microsoft finally relented. The official announcement came in a posting on the Inside Windows Live blog, where they announced “”public availability of access to the Messenger network via XMPP.”

XMPP in case you want to know, stands for eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. It’s an open source messaging framework that allows a host of services to communicate with one another. This interoperability with Microsoft Messenger puts Microsoft in the strange position of, once again, embracing open standards in place of their own.

In the scheme of things, this is a vital change, and only part of an overall corporate strategy to accept open standards, rather than closed ones, but the decision only continues a trend.

For years, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser was regarded as extremely poor when it came to rendering sites accurately, forcing developers to add special MSIE coding. That’s true for The Night Owl, where we have a special .css file designed to make the site look better in Microsoft’s app.

However, recent versions of MSIE have embraced open standards, including HTML5, in essence setting aside Microsoft’s efforts to force everyone to adhere to their own special Web features. But Apple was there first.

As much as Apple has been accused of forcing everyone to exist within their own walled garden, that’s not entirely true. Yes, the iOS and Mac OS X are traditional operating systems that are licensed to paid customers, same as Windows. On the other hand, Apple built their operating system on a base of a number of open source apps. When Safari came out, Apple licensed an open source rendering engine from the Unix world, which ultimately was morphed into WebKit. Today, the vast majority of mobile browsers use WebKit, even the one in Google’s Android OS. And the fast-growing Chrome browser is also based on WebKit.

Having failed to kill QuickTime and other Apple technologies, and force their own standards upon the rest of the computing world, Microsoft has taken a far more realistic approach. These days, they still hope for Windows everywhere, while at the same time building software for Mac OS X and, now, the iOS.

If you never used Microsoft Messenger, of course, none of this makes any difference at all. If you were stuck with having to use a third-party app, or switching from, say, iChat, to Microsoft Messenger, when you wanted to reach someone using Microsoft’s IM network, the forthcoming ability to do everything in a single program will be a revelation.

Of course, this move doesn’t mean you will begin to feel warm and fuzzy about Microsoft and Steve Ballmer. Their products, other than xBox and the Windows OS and apps, will continue to suffer in the marketplace until they can come up with some bright ideas that people really like.

But I will await that first call from a Microsoft Messenger user in iChat.

When Microsoft announced that they would build a Mac version of Outlook — their professional Windows email client — for Office 2011, I had some guarded hopes. After all, Encourage had proven to be a buggy mess. Not only would it crash frequently regardless of the Mac I was using, or the OS version, but that dreaded monolithic database file in which messages were stored might cause trouble.

You see, from time to time, the database would go bad. True, Microsoft had some clumsy tools to fix it, but unless you had a recent backup, no promises. Even with the backup, you might lose hours and hours of messages, critical ones.

Although it took a while for Apple’s Mail app to achieve a fair balance of features, performance, not to mention retaining a simple, elegant interface, it doesn’t seem as if Microsoft has made a whole lot of progress in building a robust email client. You’d think that, after spending tens of billions of dollars on research and development, surely there was enough cash left over to allow the Macintosh Business Unit the resources to give Office 2011 the proper level of spit and polish.

This doesn’t mean that Microsoft hasn’t done any updates to Outlook since the original release. There have been several, including one this week. But it seems as if most of the fixes dealt with potential security vulnerabilities and a few stability issues. But better stability doesn’t replace badly implemented features, or a curious behavior issue under Lion.

Now I realize Microsoft evidently expects to provide Lion compatibility in an Office update some time in 2012. So if you want support for such features as Auto Save and Version, prepare to wait. Or use iWork. But it’s also true that Outlook is unable to import user accounts from Mac OS 10.7 Mail. Is that also strictly a Lion compatibility issue? It would seem to me that parsing a few email settings for import ought to be a fairly trivial matter. But this is Microsoft, and nothing is trivial to them.

In any case, my experience with Outlook 11 was pretty awful on Day One, where I couldn’t get the app to run for more than a short time without seeing it unceremoniously quit. This usually occurred after configuring it with several email accounts, which have tens of thousands of messages. Since I use IMAP mail, all of these messages had to be downloaded from the mail server to my Mac, and that’s where things went astray. Maybe a memory leak? I don’t have the answers, except that a couple of updates later, that particular problem didn’t occur.

The next issue is rather more complicated, and if I lose you along the way in my efforts to make this clear to you, let me apologize in advance.

An email account will be divided into several folders, including the Inbox, Junk, Sent, Trash, Notes, and the folders you add to organize your messages. With an IMAP account, those messages will either appear as subdirectories of your Inbox, or separated from the Inbox under the email account name you specify. It’s a matter of preference, but Apple Mail will normally organize them separately, which is my preferred mode of operation. There is, in both Mail and Outlook, the option to collapse the Inbox, so all of the new mail seems to land in one place, though it’s actually still going to separate accounts.

Now in order for the email app to determine whether to integrate the other folders in your account as subdirectories of the Inbox, or to put them separately, you have to specify what’s called an IMAP Path Prefix in your preferences. In some email systems, it’s INBOX, in others it’s not necessary.

Now Apple Mail often figures this out in testing your account during the setup process, sometimes it doesn’t. But fixing the problem (or changing the layout) is simple and involves adding or removing the prefix, though it may take a few minutes for the app to reorganize loads of email.

Well, with Outlook 2001, the IMAP Path Prefix setting is meaningless. It doesn’t do anything, and thus the messages remain integrated with your Inbox in Outlook. You can’t change it, or I haven’t been able to do so. I’ve even posted a message in Microsoft’s support forum about the issue, and the support person who responded said there is no solution, at least for now.

I realize that such granular issues of email organization may not make very much sense to you, and thus you have no concerns about Outlook. I don’t think I’m alone in this concern, and that’s only part of the picture. I am not at all impressed with Outlook’s performance. Even though Microsoft has liberated the app from that monolithic database (there’s still a small one and the same awkward repair tools), performance remains tepid.

Microsoft insists that Outlook was built from the ground up in Apple’s Cocoa environment. Maybe so. But it sure does seem that a lot of bad coding concepts were carried through anyway, because Outlook doesn’t feel that much different from Entourage, except for the loss or alteration of some features, and the revised interface.

Maybe the Lion savvy version of Outlook will be better. But I’m not expecting much.

Certainly the skies must seem cloudy to the executives at Microsoft these days. PC sales are flat, so Windows 7 sales are still growing, but not as fast as before. Microsoft’s efforts to turn Bing into a true Google competitor appear to have faltered; most of the share gains come at the expense of Yahoo!, which also uses Bing technology. And let’s not get started about Windows Phone, which has gone just about nowhere compared to the iOS and Android.

I suppose you can make all sorts of assumptions why Microsoft’s luster appears to be irrevocably tarnished. But a lot of it seems to result from the lack of vision, and perhaps the unfortunate obsession with a “Windows everywhere” strategy.

Now it’s not that Microsoft isn’t trying, though the success of their strategy is debatable. Both Windows Phone 7, and version 7.5 have gotten decent reviews from the critics, but customers continue to look elsewhere. So Microsoft entered into a multi-billion dollar partnership with Nokia to produce a new line of smartphones, beginning with the Lumia series, which debuted in Europe. It’s not obvious that this move will turn things around.

And don’t forget that Nokia’s CEO, Stephen Elop, is a former Microsoft employee. Was he a stalking horse too? I wouldn’t presume to guess.

These days, Microsoft’s newest scheme is to graft a descendant of the failed Zune interface, dubbed Metro, onto Windows 8. The interface has already failed to make Windows Phone 7 shine, so why does Microsoft believe that success will somehow follow when Windows 8 arrives? Did the public clamor for Metro, and for dumping it onto the next version of Windows? Why does Microsoft believe that an interface that has already failed to catch fire will somehow succeed if they try it again elsewhere? And you don’t have to remind me that one definition of insanity is to keep doing the same things, hoping for a different result.

Another common tactic employed by Microsoft to deal with a failed strategy is to move executives around in a foolish attempt to make magic. So bombastic CEO Steve Ballmer this week announced to his employees that Windows Phone President Andy Lee has been shuffled off to a new position, referred to as a “time-critical opportunity focused on driving maximum impact in 2012 with Windows Phone and Windows 8.”

Does that mean that Lee has been removed from the line of fire and placed in some meaningless position where he can collect a paycheck without doing any damage? It’s hard to know, and the tech media hasn’t decided if this is a parallel move or some sort of demotion. It appears to be the latter, and it may well be that Ballmer made this decision because Microsoft would have to pay a load of severance cash to Lee if they decided to show him the door. But if they set him up in some invisible position, he won’t make trouble. Later on, he can be fired in a way that won’t call attention to his predicament.

Or maybe Ballmer was just being kind to Lee for some unaccountable reason.

Ballmer’s letter continued to express a real disengagement from reality, where he went on to say that Lee had been responsible for a “ton of progress.” What sort of progress is he talking about? Windows Phone is a failure. It hasn’t caught on, and implying otherwise doesn’t change a thing. And if he truly made a “ton of progress” why was he removed from his position?

In Lee’s place, Ballmer selected Terry Myerson, the Windows Phone engineering lead. Ballmer’s logic in choosing from within the company is that Myerson “has been so integrally involved in our Windows Phone work already. I’m confident that he can make a seamless transition to this new and broader leadership responsibility.”

In other words, a lieutenant for the poor performing executive replaces that executive. So how does that change anything? Is Myerson the magic bullet, someone with the vision and the ability to turn around a platform that has, so far anyway, gotten a thumbs down in the marketplace?

As you readers might recall, in the past five years alone, Microsoft has dumped $42 billion into R&D. Other than the continuing success of the Xbox and related products, what have they delivered to stockholders for that investment? In contrast, Apple has spent $10 billion in the last decade. Apple will also jettison a failed product, and not toss money into the trash bin. So when the Power Mac G4 cube didn’t catch fire, even though it was clearly a favorite of Steve Jobs, Apple made the cold and hard decision to discontinue the product.

Indeed, if the iPhone and the iPad weren’t huge successes from the get-go, I doubt that Apple would have kept them on the market for very long. With Apple TV, although sales haven’t been that high, it appears to be profitable, and is, in fact, one of the most popular entrants in the connected TV space. If it didn’t hold it’s own, Apple would have given up on their hobby real fast. Would that Microsoft could begin to understand the concept. Maybe stockholders should be demanding a change from the top. Imagine if half that $42 billion were returned to stockholders as dividends, rather than being squandered on useless products. But that’s not Microsoft’s way.

When the iPhone 4s first shipped, it wasn’t long before an inconvenient problem was discovered. Some owners reported that battery life wasn’t near what Apple promised, making it necessary to recharge far more often than they expected. Consider what might happen if you were on the road, accustomed to your iPhone lasting an entire day, but having it shut down prematurely because the battery was spent.

Well, Apple released a quick update to the iOS, version 5.0.1, ostensibly to fix that problem. But they ultimately admitted that there were still some issues that might impair battery life. So the wait continues, this time for a rumored version 5.1, which will also add improvements to Siri. Or at least that’s what the published reports say.

Now it may well be that Apple believed they caught all the battery life issues with their first effort, only to be shown that they were wrong. Maybe. Or they knew all along that they only managed to fix some of the problems, hoping few customers would notice. At least they could have been more forthcoming in the release notes for 5.0.1. I also suppose the original update wasn’t necessarily a rush job, since there didn’t appear to be any downsides for most iPhone users impacted by the original problem. Well, at least except for some who claim battery life became worse.

But the real issues with an iPhone may well be certain missing features that conspire to irritate. First and foremost, there’s email, perhaps one of the more significant features of any smartphone. Certainly that was the BlackBerry’s stock in trade long before the iPhone came to be. What’s more, Apple advertises superior email capabilities, not simply because of the neat interface and good performance, but because there’s support for Microsoft Exchange, thus making the device more suitable for the business world, where Exchange is king.

That being said, it seems curious that Apple continues to overlook some critical email features that should have been added long ago.

First and foremost is a real junk filter. I suppose that Apple expects you to be using the spam filtering system on your Mac or PC’s email client, or the one installed on the mail server. But what if your Mac or PC isn’t running, say in the evening, and your email service doesn’t have the best spam filtering. Suddenly your Inbox is saddled with garbage that you don’t want or need. While it’s not difficult to move that stuff to the Junk folder, why require such manual labor in a 21st century mobile computer? Is a functioning spam filter that difficult to implement in an environment where resources are limited? Well, maybe, but there are other features that ought to be considered.

Just recently, I wrote a column in which I referred to such default signatures as “Sent from my iPhone” as little more than free advertising for the manufacturer — at least if that’s not your thing. I was doubly annoyed the other day when, for reasons I’ve yet to fathom, some iOS settings were turned to default. Thus my chosen signature was history, replaced with Apple’s.

However, the real problem is that, whatever signature you choose, you can only have one. So you may have both your personal and business email accounts on your iPhone or iPad. That’s a common scenario, and you want different signatures. Sure, there are inconvenient shortcuts, such as using autocorrect to “explode” a particular keyboard shortcut for your signature. But why can’t you just have two or more, pinned to a specific account? I’ll take that if letting you choose a signature on the fly isn’t quite as easy to implement, though I fail to see it being so difficult.

Another key email feature is filtering or rules. You want email with specific subject lines (perhaps created by a Contact link on your business site) or from specific people automatically funneled to a different folder. This is easily done on a Mac or PC with most popular email clients. It would seem, at the very least, that iOS Mail would just support the rule structure in Mail and Outlook for the Mac and PC.

Yes, I realize that some online email systems let you set the rules in a Web-based interface, although the capabilities might vary depending on the setup.

Now I can tell you that I have eight email rules of various levels of complexity set in Mail. Obviously, the same filters are in use on both my desktop and portable Macs. But when they are in idle mode, those messages are, like unfiltered spam, deposited in the Inbox. Worse, you can only move a message manually to another folder in the same account, where a traditional email client’s filtering will often allow you to move messages from several accounts into a single folder in a single account. Maybe you don’t see the usefulness, but you will if you do business with several accounts for different sites, each of which is intended to handle messages that all fit into a single category.

When the iOS first came out, the lack of key features was a given. Apple doesn’t like to add capabilities until they work reasonably well, which is why you had to wait a while for a usable cut, copy, and paste feature. I suppose you might say that the original Push Notification feature was also highly flawed, but it worked all right within the constraints of a modal dialog.

But with version 5, I would have hoped Apple would have added some features that weren’t so glitzy, but still offered significant functions. I suppose I can always hope for better with iOS 6.