HP is in search of direction these days. After buying Palm for $1.2 billion, HP produced the TouchPad tablet but, in the face of poor sales, disappointed customers, and tepid reviews, killed the product within a few weeks. They managed to sell a ton of them with a $99 fire sale, and, at the same time, decided to ditch CEO Leo Apotheker.

But before Apotheker was shown the door, he also announced that HP was looking to spin off or sell their popular PC division, because of slim profits. Don’t forget that, by volume, HP is the number one PC maker on the planet, at least for this year. If they can’t make it work who can?

Well, in the rush to find a replacement, HP’s board chose one of their own, Meg Whitman, famous for being President and CEO of eBay from 1998 to 2008. During that time, although she stewarded the growth of eBay into an online auction powerhouse, she also green lit the acquisition of PayPal and Skype. The former decision has had debatable results from a customer standpoint; the latter proved a disaster. These days, Skype is a division of Microsoft.

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So almost every day, you hear about the status of one of those ongoing lawsuits in the tech industry. These days it’s Apple versus someone-or-other or one of those someone-or-others versus Apple. The legal skirmishes are largely focused on the iPhone, iOS and the iPad, with Apple insisting that their intellectual property is being violated by the knockoff du jour.

At the same time, you have to wonder how companies with supposedly smart engineers and lawyers manage to commit so many supposedly egregious offenses. Surely they’ve had the time to compare their new products with those of other companies, and there should be an in-house computer database of patents so they can see the areas in which they might conflict.

On the other hand, it may well be that there are so many patents in force that it’s nearly impossible to ever know which ones you’re violated. You roll the dice, hoping your product or service will escape notice, well maybe.

But it seems to me, and I’m not a patent attorney, that some are so simple and so obvious that it makes no sense for patent agencies to grand exclusivity. Take, for example, Amazon’s famous 1-Click ordering system. On the surface, it comes across as supremely logical. Click once after adding an item to your shopping cart, and the order is placed. Behind the scenes, Amazon and other vendors who use the system are charging your credit card or initiating a transfer from your bank account, and using your specified shipping address with which to send your merchandise, if you aren’t just ordering a service, such as a streaming video or MP3.

The logistics of performing a 1-Click transaction are said to be fairly easy, involving cookies and other traditional Web tools. So the question arises: What raises this feature to the level of a technology that’s sufficiently innovative to grant someone a patent?

Of course, other companies have opted to pay the piper rather than fight. Even Apple licensed 1-Click to handle their online transactions. Of course that happened in 2000, when Apple wasn’t exactly a financial powerhouse, so maybe they felt it would be cheaper to just send Amazon a check.

So what was the United States Patent and Trademark Office thinking when they decided that 1-Click was something special, something unique, something that deserved a patent?

But that’s not the only example of what strikes me as foolishness. Consider TiVO and their almost endless lawsuits against Dish Network, which was eventually resolved to the former’s favor. The feature? The ability to record one TV show (or Pay-Per-View movie) while watching another. It seems so eminently sensible that it’s hard to imagine any one company getting exclusivity. However, it may also be true that the underlying process proved difficult to perfect, and thus TiVO deserved that patent. Certainly most of their income these days comes from licensing rather than the sale of those DVRs, so it all makes sense, I suppose.

However, some intellectual property claims do seem a tad curious. It seems to me that Apple might be going overboard in attacking competing companies, particularly Samsung. Consider the shape of a smartphone or an iPad. The argument is that, viewed from a distance, Samsung’s tablet and an iPad seem almost the same. Perhaps. But now look at ten 50-inch flat panel TVs from a distance where the manufacturer’s labels aren’t readily discernible. How different do they look, really? The same can be said for any number of generic PCs.

But a TV isn’t necessarily an equivalent example, since many of these products actually use identical internal parts. The LCD and plasma panels installed inside TVs from many companies are really sourced from only a few. Other internal parts may also be generic, although each manufacturer may build unique silicon to cover signal processing, menu displays and other features that are meant to stand out from the crowd. No doubt there are patents covering many of these features.

When it comes to the PC box, however, most parts are the same, from processors, to graphics chips, hard drives, solid state drives, and optical drives. To compete with the MacBook Air, Intel has created and is licensing an Ultrabook reference design. A PC maker only has to essentially duplicate the blueprint using the same or similar components, put their own branding on that box and call it their own. That, alas, is true for most PCs these days.

What bothers me about the whole thing, however, is how much time and money is wasted defending intellectual property. Apple is clearly investing many millions to defend their intellectual property. And while they deserve to protect their patents, you have to wonder if the agencies who grant those patents might do well to consider raising the bar. To be protected, an invention has to be unique, not just a minor variation of what came before, or something that, on the surface and below the surface, is so simple it hardly makes sense to grant ownership of that design to a single individual or company.

Those industry analysts seem to agree that Apple is headed towards a stellar quarter as we near the final holiday shopping period. There will supposedly be record numbers of iPhones and Macs sold, therefore supporting Apple’s predictions of amazing revenue and profits. That is the good news.

But there might be a little cloud in the silver lining, and it’s all about the iPad. Suddenly the analysts are claiming that iPad sales seem a bit “light” in their surveys, or after examining their crystal balls. Thus, Apple may sell a million or so fewer units than they originally expected.

Now understand that industry analysts don’t always get their figures right. They have an awful habit of mostly underestimating Apple’s sales. But last quarter was the exception, where they were delivering highly inflated estimates of iPhone sales. It was all without common sense, since the iPhone 4 was long in the tooth, and it was fairly obvious a new model would arrive by October. But knowing or suspecting a later release of the iPhone 4’s successor clearly caused a number of customers to postpone their purchases. How could it be otherwise?

So, those sales estimates had to be wrong.

Now complicating the iPad picture is the arrival of the Amazon Kindle Fire, a seven-inch $199 tablet that has gotten a lot of hype, but mostly tepid reviews from the tech and mainstream media. Typical of tablets based on the Android OS, the touch interface is ragged, not sufficiently sensitive, and responsiveness varies depending on the function. It’s not tight, fluid and smooth, as with the iPad.

Sure, OS updates from Amazon may repair some of the ills, although there are well known architectural issues with Android that impact potential touchscreen performance. Supposedly Google is still fixing the problems with newer OS releases, but Amazon has opted to use an older version that was never actually certified for use in a tablet. Curious. So what they can fix may be sharply limited.

Regardless, the Fire’s cheap price and the integration with Amazon’s famous online storefront may be sufficient to attract loads of buyers, perhaps several million this quarter. But where those sales come from is debatable. Some suggest that people looking at Android tablets will opt for the Fire because of its tight integration with Amazon, and the Kindle’s reputation in the marketplace.

Will they choose the Fire over an iPad? Well, on a head-to-head comparison, the iPad is far superior. But the price and the size may put off some customers. How many is an open question. Amazon has, so far at least, not released specific sales numbers for previous versions of the Kindle beyond a few generalities that aren’t very helpful.

It may also be that some customers may consider the iPad too limiting for their needs. If they go Apple, perhaps they choose a MacBook Air, because they want a traditional personal computer. So far as Apple is concerned, a sale is a sale, and they earn higher profits from Macs.

There is also the question of how many iPads can Apple rightly expect to move each quarter. Because sales have already far eclipsed Macs, it has been assumed that the iPad is a potential replacement for a PC in many situations. While this appears to be true, I wonder how many people out there actually use the iPad as a substitute rather than simply as another device. If the former, the iPad’s potential might not be predictable right now. It hasn’t been on the market long enough to truly know how popular it may ultimately be after the ardor cools, if it cools.

Now I am not raining on anyone’s parade when I tell you that I have not taken to the iPad all that much. I use an iPad 2 occasionally, but my wife has made it her PC of choice. She never spent a whole lot of time with a Mac or PC, and only when it was actually necessary. But she’s addicted to her iPad, and that may indicate a major potential if her choices are echoed by many others. How many people, like her, would happily divest themselves of a PC and use a tablet instead?

For me, the ideal computing environment right now is my desktop iMac, a 27-inch late 2009 model with Intel Core i7 processor. Call me old fashioned. An iPhone 4 follows me whenever I travel. At night it’s placed in the bedroom, on a table, ready for me to check email and perhaps research a site while watching TV or engaging in conversation with the Mrs. I used to bring in a MacBook Pro for evening computing chores, but no more. I still have a 2010 model, but don’t use it nearly as often as I used to.

I’ve tried to adapt to the iPad, but it just doesn’t suit my lifestyle, but the iPhone 4 is more than sufficient for my needs, and it’s more suited for single handed use. If I need a larger screen, and the functionality of a real personal computer, I just walk across the dwelling to the bedroom that serves as an office, but that doesn’t happen very often.

Does my reaction to the iPad, my innate skepticism, mean anything in a wider universe? Are there limitations to the potential of the iPad? Probably not, and we really won’t know how well the iPad 2 is really faring this holiday season until the final numbers are revealed by Apple in the latter part of January.

You can bet that once Steve Jobs was quoted as having licked the problem of fixing a TV’s interface, in that best-selling autobiography from Walter Isaacson, speculation about the form of the new device would run rampant. Indeed, the ongoing discussion implies that today’s TV market must be sadly broken to need an Apple solution.

That, however, is based on some assumptions that may not actually be true. The main assumption is that there’s something wrong with the way TVs work now, and consumers are begging for solutions. Really?

When it came to digital music players, before the iPod arrived in 2001, they didn’t work so well. Interfaces were obtuse, and you had to jump through hoops to download your music library. Of course, they also used USB 1.1, which was dreadfully slow. The fundamental iPod solutions were to use FireWire (later replaced with USB 2.0), adding a spiffy user interface, a reasonably-sized compact hard drive to store thousands of tracks, and integrate everything with iTunes.

In short, the existing system was broken, and Apple provided a needed fix.

While smartphones were pretty successful before the iPhone came along, Apple simplified the user interface to make it more consumer friendly, offered a snappy touchscreen, end-to-end integration, and all from a company that supposedly had no experience building mobile handsets. Even though the iOS has been updated annually, the fundamentals were there from the very first day, and the rest of the industry was thrown into heavy-duty copycat mode.

When it came to the iPad, previous efforts to build commercially successful tablet computers had failed, despite Microsoft claiming every single year it would be the next great thing. To Microsoft, a tablet was just another portable PC, albeit with a touch-sensitive screen, generally employing a clumsy stylus, and a swivel capability. They were also more expensive than traditional note-books, with no proven advantage except for certain vertical markets, such as medical offices.

Apple’s solution was to take the lessons learned from the iPhone and the iOS and scale them up to a larger form factor, one that was not just a consumption device, such as today’s Amazon Kindle Fire, but a tool on which to perform many types of productive work. But a major advantage the iPad had over the competition was the result of Apple’s ability to deliver it at a price much lower than industry expectations. Tim Cook’s genius is to be able to manage inventory as well or better than anyone in the industry, and Apple made big deals for key components to keep the costs down. Thus, the iPad’s price was not only reasonable, but Apple still made a huge profit from each and every sale.

So what about TVs? Is there a need for a better set up interface, simpler channel selection and program recording capabilities, and improved integration of the various Internet streaming services?

Nowadays, you have to contend with multiple boxes, including coping with the usually lame interface provided by your cable or satellite provider. If you want streaming, you get another appliance, and learn a different interface, or rely on the one delivered in your “connected” TV. Since the standard set top box is free or available for a low-cost rental, it’s hard to find a space in which to properly integrate another box. The Apple TV is well designed and all, but it’s still the second box, unless you eschew broadcast and cable TV.

But the real question is whether users feel they are somehow being deprived in the present environment. Just watching your favorite programs involves the same routine you learned with your very first TV. You change the channel. If you want to record a show for later viewing, your set top box can usually manage that function with a couple of clicks, and there’s usually a Season Pass option, where all new episodes of a show will be recorded. That is, of course, unless they conflict with other shows. You’ll then be warned, and have to navigate a more complicated interface to make your choice. Since you can only record two shows at a time, while watching a third over the air via your set’s built-in tuner, or a previously recorded selection, how does Apple improve upon that?

One possibility is to offer different TV networks and other content offerings as separate streaming channels. If you can schedule an episode on a network for later view without tying up your own equipment, I suppose you’d get more flexibility. But if everything is streamed to your home, how about the ISP’s bandwidth allotment? Yes, it may be unlimited in theory, but if more and more people are saturating the pipes, you’d find those often unmentioned limits being imposed real fast. This is particularly true if the ISPs were giving up cable TV business to Apple. They’d might just enact higher fees for such heavy users.

Beyond content, there’s the initial setup routine. Most of you just turn your set on, maybe navigate a quick setup menu, OK everything and then get on with your business. But wouldn’t it be nice if the set was equipped with, say, a camera to measure the ambient light and color temperature, and automatically tune picture quality to conform, with perhaps an option to make a separate setting for a darkened or lighted room? If everything but your cable or satellite service were offered with Apple’s famous spit and polish, maybe that would be a big advantage.

But it all comes down to this: An Apple branded TV set may appeal to those willing to pay extra for a premium product, but are current owners dissatisfied with what they have? Are they putting off purchases because of interface and usability quibbles, or simply because they don’t need or cannot afford a new model? Is today’s TV viewing environment broken? I don’t think so.