Before I go on, let me go on the record to state that I do not believe that Apple is planning to hold a special press conference next week to roll out a subscription program for publications (such as magazines and newspapers) on the iPad. Further, I do not expect to see the Mac App Store suddenly spring forth right away either. You can take both statements to the bank.

It’s not that I’m being hard-nosed about all this, but does it really make sense to have any of these new features or services rolled out just a couple of weeks before Christmas? Not from a marketing point of view, not to mention logic.

In saying that, I do see some interesting if not surprising things from Apple next year that I’ll cover briefly, with the ever-present reminder that I’m just making a reasonably educated guess. Nothing more, nothing less.

So that takes us to the first two topics, and I expect that, if a reasonable number of publishers are on board, we’ll see the realization of the subscription service, mostly for the iPad. Whether it’ll save the publishing industry and provide a money-making alternative for print, I can’t say. But it’ll probably happen anyway.

The Mac App Store has already been promised for some time next month, unless there’s a last minute glitch of course. The real question is whether some of the special-purpose utilities, such as the audio-capturing apps that include Ambrosia Software’s WireTap Studio, and Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack Pro, will be allowed because they do special things with the sound hardware. The WireTap Studio installation even includes a kernel extension, a system add-on, which appears to be verboten under Mac App Store guidelines.

I would even wonder if such sprawling apps and suites, such as Adobe Creative Suite, would gain admission, because they are somewhat liberal in the placement of extra or support files. But since it hardly seems that Apple can expect loads of developers to make major changes to accommodate the new order, I expect there will be a coexistence of sorts between Apple and third-party developers and dealers.

In the end, few are taking bets that the Mac App Store isn’t going to assume a large portion of the software market for the platform. That might be a bad thing, because developers will lose control over the distribution of their products, even if there’s de facto freedom to continue to do business. On the other hand, the constraints of Apple’s setup process might make for easier installations and removals, and that’s an area where things sometimes get a little confusing, particularly for those who are not power users.

You’d think software installs on the Mac should be simple. Just double-click the Installer, select a target drive (if need be) and let it do its thing. But not all apps come with installers. Some are just meant to be dragged and dropped into the Applications folder, but the method of distribution, often a disk image file, can add to the confusion. I have run into more than a few Mac users who attempt to run the apps direct from the disk image, or end up with loads of copies of an app strewn across their hard drive.

App removal ought to involve dragging the icon to the trash, emptying it, and that’s it. But when support files and preference files pollute your Mac, that simple task isn’t simple. Some apps have removal utilities; for others, you might look to a third party alternative that may be only partly successful. With the Mac App Store, you may be able to zap your software — all of it — with a click or two. Peace at last! And if third parties want to compete on their own turf, they’ll have to make installation and removal just as seamless.

But the real big news for 2011 will likely cover other fronts. There’s little doubt that iPad 2.0 will debut at a launch party, probably in February, with shipment promised soon thereafter. Since there’s unsold stock to consider, Apple will want to align the announcement and delivery as closely as possible, and not until there’s at least a semblance of inventory on hand.

The new model will likely sport a thinner, and perhaps lighter, form factor, a revelation for those who regard today’s iPad as a little heavy for single-handed use, particularly reading. A front-facing camera is a given, considering that Apple wants every possible customer to be able to talk via FaceTime. There’s even a suggestion Apple might want to drop $100 from the price on all or most models, to really confuse and befuddle the competition that can barely match that of the current iPad.

It is also near certain that a Verizon Wireless iPhone will debut, but whether it’ll be a refashioned version of the current model with revised hardware to support the new carrier, or whether Apple will wait for iPhone 5 to sell as a unified model, only Apple, Verizon and a handful of other wireless partners know for sure.

What does also seem near certain is that there will be some sort of antenna design change, however subtle, to forever rid Apple of the specter of Antennagate. The iPhone 5 may even sport some improvements that would be sufficient for Apple to tout an innovative, more sensitive antenna sure to trump the competition, and (hopefully) get accolades from the lame reviewers at Consumer Reports magazine.

Later on in the year, there will be Mac OS X Lion. There will be lots to talk about there, but not in this column.

There are no doubt some people in our audience who feel that Steve Jobs is a little loose in the head, maybe not the sanest person on the planet, but is a positively brilliant visionary and businessperson. After all, who else in the tech industry, even Bill Gates, could have taken Apple in 1997, ruthlessly jettisoned underperforming products, righted the sinking ship, and, in the ensuing years, made it an industry leader?

That sure explains why Jobs keeps getting all those “CEO of the year” awards. Such accolades aren’t bestowed casually, and don’t forget that there are many financial and media people who have it in for Apple, and Jobs in particular. They can’t wait for the opportunity to put them down, for real or imagined indiscretions.

At the same time, so many corporations can undergo executive realignments, departures and arrivals, and yet sales and profits seem to follow the same path dictated by the state of the economy. Visions be damned. This quarter’s sales and those for the next are what matters. For the rest, just follow the industry trends, toss a bunch of products and services to the winds, and hope a few will catch a breeze.

When it comes to Microsoft, Steve Ballmer is most everyone’s irrational CEO. Of course, he’s a salesperson, not a designer or programmer. Put him before a PC to design the next version of Windows or Windows Phone 7 for that matter, and he wouldn’t have a clue what to do next. Ask him to parse and predict industry trends with reasonable accuracy, and he’d be way out of his element.

It’s fair to say Bill Gates didn’t take to the corporate visionary position very well either. Sure, he had the right idea early on to dominate the business PC market, but many of his predictions for our technology future have been all or mostly wrong.

Well, I suppose he had it somewhat right about the potential for tablet-based computers, but he envisioned something running Windows, and leveraging existing hardware. He wasn’t able to see beyond those narrow confines. But Apple did, which is why the iPad took off so fast, and the industry is engaged in a huge initiative to play catch up.

Whether the so-called iPad killers will bear fruit is an open question. Yes, I suppose the global rollout of the 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab was a reasonable success, but it’s hard to know if the initial demand will taper off. Reviews are mixed, and it may well be that there will be buyer’s remorse before long. Bear in mind that netbooks were also initially adopted rather quickly, but demand has stagnated, even as the products become less expensive. That’s because the PC industry didn’t spend much time building those designs, aside from simply finding ways to shrink the hardware, and use the cheapest components possible. It was all about being cheap, rather than providing meaningful value.

Many customers clearly saw through the deception.

Now when it comes to the lazy or clueless executive list, I’m wondering if you can’t add RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis, the result of his recent comments at an industry conference, Or at least according to a commentary from Daniel Eran Dilger, in his Roughly Drafted Magazine blog.

To be fair to RIM, the BlackBerry set the tone for the smartphone industry. Here you have an independent company beating the pants off not just industry giants as Microsoft, but Palm as well. The BlackBerry, and its original physical keyboard, became big business for the Canadian tech company. Even President Obama has opted to own one, though you wonder if an iPhone isn’t on his radar.

In any case, RIM is in a different place today. The iPhone has totally altered the smartphone landscape. Although tens of millions of units are still sold with RIM-style keyboards, many also support touch. The App Store and fancy consumer-level features may have even caught RIM flat-footed.

It’s not that RIM doesn’t want to compete, and isn’t trying. But when Lazaridis couldn’t justify performance problems with the BlackBerry Touch beyond saying you should for next year’s models with dual-core processors, you had to wonder where his head is at. Consider that loads of Android and iOS devices offer perfectly snappy interfaces without need of such powerful hardware. Isn’t a mobile OS designed to be efficient?

I expect even a Windows Phone 7 smartphone is fast enough.

But the real problem with Lazaridis is that he cannot convey a single coherent vision of the state of the mobile device industry and where he hopes to take RIM to remain relevant. He wasn’t able to comprehend the differences and similarities between a smartphone and a tablet. Worse, he had no compelling reason, not a one, to convince anyone to continue to buy RIM gadgets. Why bother?

In the real world, Android smartphones may be exceeding the iPhone in sales, but that’s for loads of models from different makers. When you compare the single product lines of two companies, Apple and RIM, the former is prospering, and RIM may be in danger of becoming an also-ran that will eventually find itself more and more irrelevant unless their executives can deliver a coherent vision for the future.

So there’s an article on CNN Money (link not worth providing) that aims to criticize Apple for suggesting lame solutions for those who feel abandoned because the Xserve is being discontinued and, worse, failing to really convey the message that they understand the concerns of business customers.

For those who care, the Xserve was Apple’s attempt to deliver a traditional pizza box or rack server for the enterprise.

Before I go further, please bear in mind that sales estimates have generally run about 10,000 copies per quarter. This is for a company that sells four million Macs, over 14 million iPhones and (at least for this quarter) an unknown number of iPads for the same period.

When you compare the Xserve to those numbers, it becomes abundantly clear that it’s an extremely tiny tool in Apple’s product arsenal. More to the point, has the Xserve actually expanded Apple’s presence in the enterprise, or was it largely used primarily for existing customers in small business and school systems?

It turns out that Apple did better with the Mac mini, even though it is mostly unsuited to traditional rack server needs. At the same time, lots of people have managed to create tiny server farms that do contain loads of Mac minis. For many users, particularly those who simply put them in back rooms or in closets, it’s a wonderfully inexpensive product that’s fairly easy and powerful enough for smaller networks.

In a regular server environment, the hardware has to be designed for offsite management and easy exchange of components in case of failure. You may have twin power supplies, and live swapping of hard drives so that there’s no downtime. With a Mac mini, you’d probably want to set up external FireWire drives for decent performance, and to be able to easily transport them to a replacement unit in case the original fails.

More to the point, even though Xserve sales, according to published reports, remained essentially stagnant for years, Apple’s presence in the business world has continued to expand. A main reason is that corporate executives and employees have acquired millions and millions of iPhones and Macs, and now the iPad. Apple has added key features to mobile products, such as remote management, and decent Exchange Server support across the product line.

Sure, maybe a Mac wouldn’t be on the radar for a company that just wants a few thousand cheap PC boxes custom configured. Apple can get you all the Macs you want, they might even bend on pricing for large quantities, but you have to select your gear from the standard or limited customization versions. You can’t ditch Wi-Fi or a Web cam simply because a company may not require them. But that hasn’t stopped IT people from simply opening up new Macs and disabling the unneeded hardware internally, usually be disconnecting or clipping cables. They would be reconneted when the computers are resold.

When all is said and done, however, it doesn’t matter. The armchair assassins apparently cannot tolerate Apple’s ongoing success going their own way. It’s very easy to sit back and put words in a blog or word processor, and pretend you actually know something. It’s a lot harder to do research and try to accurately report what’s really going on.

With The Night Owl, I readily admit my faults, and that loads of technical matters may be way above my pay grade. Instead, I try to take a realistic approach to what’s going on, and not to make criticisms simply because they are provocative, and will generate lots of hits and comments.

Indeed, sometimes you have to look at a blog’s comments to see whether someone actually knows what they’re doing. Sure there will be pro and con statements, and some are downright dumb. But when all the rancor is directed at the original writer because they are just saying downright stupid things, you’ll know that may have been the intention all along, to stir trouble — well, assuming that writer can’t do any better.

I’m also troubled by the assumptions that Apple is forever wrong. This sort of treatment has been ongoing for years. At one time, Apple deserved the brickbats, because they screwed up constantly, and they are lucky many of us stuck with them through thick and thin during the lean years.

Yes, we all know that Steve Jobs is temperamental, and no doubt a royal pain to work with. At the same time, he is a brilliant visionary who took a fading company that was on the skids and built it into the number one tech company on the planet.

Not every company gets a second chance at success. Some just fall by the wayside, and many of the tech giants of a couple of decades ago, assuming they’re even around, have been reduced to irrelevance.

Some day, no doubt Apple will be the aging dinosaur, ready to be pounced upon and beaten down by a new kid on the block. But wishing for failure isn’t going to make it happen any faster.

I realize that Microsoft, despite being second to Apple in tech industry stock market cap, remains a behemoth to be reckoned with. But it’s also curious to see how the company arrived at that position despite remaining totally oblivious to pop culture, and what regular people want or expect.

Perhaps Microsoft’s most successful marketing campaign was the one announcing the arrival of Windows 95, the OS credited with kicking the Mac OS to the sidelines. Indeed, it took years for Apple to find its way and get on the fast track to growth at the expense of Microsoft and, in fact, Sony, RIM, and loads of other companies.

To kick-start the ad campaign, Microsoft got the rights to the Rolling Stones hit recording “Start Me Up.”

Unfortunately, the mindless wizards who devised that promotion never actually read the lyrics, particularly the third stanza that repeats “You make a grown man cry” three times.

To be fair to Microsoft’s ad agency, maybe they didn’t listen very closely. It’s not as if Mick Jagger’s verbal dexterity is so fluid that you can actually understand many of his lyrics. I remember spending a fun few hours a number of years ago with a radio programmer with whom I was working, in which we discussed a certain potentially provocative turn of phrase in “Honky Tonk Woman.” We played the segment in question dozens of times, and came back with different interpretations of what he meant.

And in case you’re wondering, it’s the phrase “I played a divorcee in New York City.” I’ll leave it to your imaginations to consider the alternatives.

In the end, if an ad campaign succeeds, the ingredients of that campaign usually don’t matter. Surely few listened to the actual “Start Me Up” lyrics or made the accidental, but accurate, connection during the Windows 95 promotion. Yes, I can also tell you, with little fear of objection, that loads and loads of Windows users, grown men or women, came close to tears coping with the various and sundry OS quirks over the years.

More recently, in the wake of the unexpected growth of the iPod, starting in 2001, Microsoft tried and failed to topple the market leader using its traditional technique of licensing technology to third parties. PlaysForSure bombed, so Microsoft decided to imitate Apple and begat the Zune. It was a decent enough product, but did “Welcome to the Social” hold any real meaning to the young audience Microsoft wanted to reach?

Clearly not. Zune fared worse than some of those highly-touted iPod killers, although it’s theoretically still available. It’s not as if Microsoft understands when to kill an unsuccessful product. Their corporate DNA often won’t allow them to move on, so we may have a Zune around until the end of time, I suppose.

In another obvious example, if Bing doesn’t sustain itself beyond the expensive and ill-thought marketing campaign, maybe they’ll call it Bong, spruce up (or at least change) the interface, and let it persevere regardless.

These days, in fact, it appears that Bing’s biggest success is largely at the expense of Yahoo! Since Bing search powers Yahoo, Microsoft is just cannibalizing itself. It doesn’t appear as if Google is suffering any. With loads and loads of Android OS phones being sold that, with few exceptions, default to Google’s search, their search traffic remains high. Despite Apple’s decision to Bing and Yahoo! as search alternatives for Safari, Google remains in the lead by a wide margin, simply because so few people actually change the default setting.

In any case, I could go on with the miserable Microsoft ads, and the lack of wisdom behind them.

Not so long ago, Microsoft recruited Jerry Seinfeld, star of a 1990s sitcom “about nothing,” and paired him with Bill Gates to record ads about nothing. After a couple of these pathetic efforts failed to generate anything but sad laughter, they were stopped. Seinfeld reportedly got $10 million for his efforts, which isn’t too shabby for a couple of day’s work at acting the fool.

A more recent campaign featured some uninformed individuals buying a new laptop, avoiding the MacBook or MacBook Pro because it was too pricy, and picking a far-inferior cheaper PC instead. Talk about buyer’s remise.

Then there’s that Windows 7 feature, highly praised by the lame consumer “who invented it,” which allows you to pin document windows on the corners of the screen. The greatest invention since sliced bread?

Don’t forget (though you may prefer to) the magical, mystical cloud nonsense that Microsoft uses to fill the airwaves between iPad and iPhone spots nowadays. The cloud concept is arcane enough, and nothing is done in these commercials to actually explain what it all means to regular people. I can see the business benefits, of course, but Microsoft is barking up the wrong tree to confuse personal needs with business collaboration initiatives.

This isn’t to suggest for a moment that Microsoft is doomed to failure, but they more and more appear to be out of gas, in need of new leadership and a sensible corporate vision. Trying to persevere because they are, well, Microsoft, may provide good sales and profits for a few years. But they are fated to fail over time until or unless they finally get it.