At one time it was fair to say that Adobe and Microsoft were enemies, rivals in some product categories, such as Web apps. So we had Adobe Flash competing against Microsoft Silverlight, and may the worst product please disappear.

At one time, in fact, Microsoft tried to develop a suite of graphics apps to compete with Adobe’s Illustrator and Photoshop. But that was just another Microsoft initiative that failed.

But why would Adobe and Microsoft suddenly consider a corporate marriage?

The answer is, of course, Apple. Adobe is chafing over the inability to run Flash on the iOS, and they no doubt feel intimidated by Apple’s competing software, primarily Final Cut Pro and Aperture. Indeed, Final Cut Pro, whose creator was once lead developer of Adobe Premiere, has become a mainstay in the movie industry. In turn, Premiere exited the Mac platform, and only returned recently.

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On October 18, Apple will release financials for the September quarter. They are expected to be record-breaking, and financial pundits are trying to put forward their best guesses as to what those figures might be.

At the same time, estimates are all over the place as to how much Apple gear was sold during that period. I’ve heard talk of 11 to 13 million iPhones and close to four million Macs. These figures do make a fair amount of sense, and fall in a narrow range. However, when it comes to the iPad, the numbers are all over the place.

The impact of the iPad is still one huge question mark. Some suggest that flagging netbook sales are a sure indicator that customers are opting to pay a little more for the flashy, iconic iPad. Others say the success of the iPad has yet to impact any other product in a meaningful way.

When it comes to netbooks, I just think customers have come to realize Apple was correct, which is that those shrunken portable computers just aren’t very useful. I realize most people probably buy them to accompany existing gear, something light, cheap and useful for email, Internet access and some light productivity chores. Unfortunately, the PC makers evidently took the easy way out in building such gear, and that is to make it smaller, cheaper and lighter, without regard to the user experience.

Although industry analysts don’t fully agree with me, I’ve been of the opinion that the netbook took off so quickly in the last couple of years largely because buyers wanted to save money due to the economic crisis. So they had the choice of getting something really cheap, or buying nothing at all.

The PC makers, in their rush to feed the bottom of the market, didn’t care. A sale is a sale, even if profits are minimal. Maybe they can persuade customers to trade up next time. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to realize that an unhappy customer isn’t necessarily going to just buy a second product from the same company, even if it solves the problems that existed in the original product. They are apt to just look to another manufacturer next time.

Indeed, one of the reasons Apple does so well as the product lines fatten is the historically high level of customer satisfaction. A very large portion of iPad owners previously purchased other Apple gadgets, and they were, obviously, happy campers.

In any case, starting with estimates that five million tablet computers would be sold through all of 2011, it now seems as if Apple exceeded that number in the last quarter, not to mention the original 3.27 million iPads sold during its first 80 days on sale.

Consider, also, that it has also been reported that Apple’s contract factories are now building three million iPads a month, and you know that this is one company that operates lean and mean, striving to just meet customer demand, never exceed that demand. Immediate shipment is great, but it looks better if you have to wait a few days in the weeks after a new model is introduced.

So if Apple is building three million iPads a month, that translates to an expectation of selling nine million per quarter. But most estimates don’t exceed six million, so go figure.

On the other hand, all bets are off for the rest of the year, and sales in 2011 may be off the charts. The estimates range from 21 million to 45 million. Either way, the iPad will soon exceed the user base of the traditional Mac, but there’s no indication that sales of the latter will be hurt, at least for the near future. Or maybe the Mac’s potential growth curve is so large that a minor erosion will make little difference.

Regardless of where the numbers end up, and it’s clear that estimates of this sort indicate the so-called industry analysts haven’t a clue, the iPad has already become another Apple iconic gadget. You’ll find iPads featured in TV shows, and movies can’t be far behind.

More to the point, competitors clearly do not understand how to build an iPad killer. None of the products released so far demonstrates a compelling alternative. At best, the imitators sport a handful of features that aren’t on the iPad yet, such as a front-facing camera, or perhaps that and a rear one as well.

It’s pretty certain that the next iPad will sport at least one camera, probably in the front for FaceTime, although Apple isn’t going to confirm such things. But when you consider Apple’s desire to expand FaceTime to as much hardware as possible, such a capability seems, well, natural.

In any case, it’s clear the industry was caught flat-footed with the iPad. Price estimates were much higher than the ones Apple finally set. Indeed, with iPad killers that may be priced higher than the original without a data contract with a wireless carrier, it’s clear Apple has found the magic bullet for keeping costs down, and quality high.

I have long held a love/hate relationship with Microsoft’s Mac email software. Whereas the previous entrant, an email/contact manager known as Entourage, offered a powerful range of features, it proved endlessly flaky to me in the real world.

For one thing, those inevitable lockups and, second, the feeling I was trudging through quicksand whenever I asked the app to do some serious work. Far too often, Entourage would just bog down while retrieving email from one or more of my regular accounts, which are all IMAP by the way. I use that protocol to store the messages on the server, and thus I’m able to keep them in sync regardless of which device I use.

In any case, I looked forward to the second coming of Outlook for the Mac. Although only long-term Mac users will realize this, Microsoft had a version of Outlook available in the late 1990s, before the transition to Mac OS X.

I suppose Microsoft’s logic is that they needed a consumer-focused email client on the Mac, which is why they gave us Entourage and not Outlook.

However, Microsoft, in architecting Office 2011 for the Mac, decided we needed full, or nearly full, compatibility with the Windows version. So we have the ribbon, which is basically a context-sensitive toolbar that has drawn mixed reviews on the other platform, and Outlook, which is not offered in the basic Home and Student edition of Office 2011. I presume Microsoft expects consumers to stick with Mail or one of the other free email clients, such as Thunderbird.

While the basic email/contact manager setup in Outlook mirrors that of Entourage in large part, it’s designed as a more industrial-strength app with superior support for Exchange email servers. One key improvement, both from a performance and reliability standpoint, is keeping your messages in separate files, rather than throwing everything in one huge, monolithic database.

Outlook for the Mac has also been coded, supposedly from scratch, in Apple’s Cocoa environment, which supposedly means better compatibility with Mac OS X features, not to mention superior performance.

Now I don’t pretend to understand the underlying coding issues, but I found the overall behavior of Outlook to be extremely similar to Entourage, other than the noticeably snappier response. Sure, the dialogs are prettier, and preference settings are more Mac-like, but functionality didn’t strike me as all that different, other than the enhanced, or at least changed, feature set.

My real concern, however, is that there are some seriously annoying bugs, no doubt symptoms of the 1.0 release, which make it extremely difficult for me to use Outlook, at least for now.

There are two ways to set the app up after installation. I used both, first importing my account information, rules and signatures from Apple Mail. But after I encountered some difficulties with the setup, I went ahead and quit the program, deleted the settings files, and added the new accounts from scratch, one by one.

The import process is especially faulty. Even such granular settings as using a server’s IMAP Idle command, which lets it dispatch messages to you ahead of whatever schedule you set, wasn’t retained from Mail to Outlook. Rules were especially troublesome, and they were all non-functional without serious editing, and even then, I couldn’t achieve reliable performance.

Understand that my email rules are largely ones that dispatch a message to a specific folder if it meets certain criteria. One criterion, however, doesn’t exist in Outlook, and that’s the ability to consult message content, a feature that is supported in Mail. I had always assumed Microsoft had more powerful Rules and, except for this missing feature, maybe that’s true.

When it came to actually handling email, again I ran into some flaky behavior.

For one thing, in some accounts, I prefer to use the disclosure triangle to reveal subfolders, but I’d rather hide them in others. These simple distinctions were lost by Outlook between launches. That never happens to me in Mail.

I also ran into a problem quoting material from HTML mail in a new message window. The act of selecting and replying was sufficient for the quoted content to lose its formatting.

None of this erratic behavior was cured by cleaning out Outlook and entering my accounts from scratch. I’m also concerned that Microsoft won’t allow you to reorder accounts by drag and drop, the way you can do it in Mail. The default account, whatever it might be, is always at the top, and everything else is placed alphabetically depending on the label you attach to an account.

To add insult to injury, after I returned from a short errand, I was confronted with a prompt informing me that Microsoft had to quit the program, giving me the option to send them a report about the problem.

At this point, I’d had enough. I simply quit Outlook for good, but will be happy to revisit Microsoft’s newest Mac email/contact manager app when the inevitable maintenance update arrives. With Office 2011 for the Mac going on sale later this month, I’m sure Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit is already working on that update.

But I had hoped for something better.

It has been hard to match the success of the iPod over the years largely because the product has become a cultural icon. When you think of digital media players, the iPod has almost always been a verb, in the same fashion as, perhaps, Photoshop. No competitor can compete with that, even as the product line no longer delivers large unit sales gains year over year.

When it comes to the iPad, it appears that the “killers” are also having trouble leaving the starting gate, and none appear to possess sensible marketing or design.

Now there’s a story that the iPad is has already attained the highest adoption rate, ever, of a consumer electronics gadget, even surpassing the DVD player, according to Bernstein Research. In a Behind the Money report from CNBC, Colin McGranahan, retail analyst at Bernstein Research, states: “By any account, the iPad is a runaway success of unprecedented proportion.”

The firm is basing that statement on the fact that some three million units were sold during the first 80 days, and an estimated 4.5 million units during the just-completed quarter. Of course, we won’t know the real figures for that quarter until Apple releases its financials later this month. Everything else is guesswork, and the pundits and analysts have a long history of underestimating Apple.

For 2011, the sales estimates are in the 21 million range, but again, there’s no certainty how things will play out, since that number represents a little over five million units per quarter, hardly a stretch based on the iPad’s performance so far this year, just as it begins to spread to more and more dealers.

But the real evidence that the iPad has become iconic is not its sales success. If that was true, you could regard the PC boxes from such companies as Dell and HP as iconic, when they are just commodities.

Instead, consider how the iPad is already regarded in popular culture, and certainly Apple’s product placement initiatives have to be credited with the ubiquity of their gear on movies and TV show.

Sometimes they even become part of the plot line.

You can go back to such movies as “Independence Day” and “Mission Impossible,” where the PowerBook of the 1990s was prominently featured. In the former, a PowerBook actually saved the planet by hacking the control center of an alien mothership. And, no, I won’t get into the impossibility of one of our computers somehow communicating with one of theirs. ET must be incredibly stupid!

Now in a recent episode of the TV procedural drama, “CSI: NY,” several iPads owned by a young woman who was killed off early in the show, became part of the crime scene investigation. Towards the end of the show, you almost began to believe that Apple’s corporate communications people actually contributed some of the dialog, as the iPad was touted as one of our great tech gadgets.

In another sequence, one of the show’s lead characters remarks how her young daughter knows more about the iPhone than she does. Why would that mean anything, other than to once again reveal the importance of an Apple gadget in the unfolding plot?

However, the handheld device used to display photos was definitely no iPad, or maybe the producers haven’t considered adding them to an investigator’s inventory. Or maybe they realize that the New York City Police, the department portrayed in the show, doesn’t sport such advanced gear, and artistic license might be taking things too far.

This is the first time I’ve seen an iPad play a prominent role in a TV show. I’m sure there might be others, since I can’t claim to be a real TV junkie. On the other hand, I have yet to see Hugh Laurie, who plays the title role in “House,” carrying around an iPad during his hospital rounds. The presence of iPads in medical surroundings seems a supremely logical concept. Yes, Dr. House does have a MacBook Pro.

More to the point, I’m curious to see how quickly iPads spread to other TV shows, and I don’t expect it to take very long.

But consider the plight of the rest of the PC industry. When has a Dell or HP ever been mentioned in the dialog, even if their products are visible on a set? The answer is, of course, that they are background commodities and hardly worth any more attention than a washing machine or a refrigerator, neither of which are regarded as icons either.

None of this means that the iPad will sell 21 million copies next year or more, nor how successful it’ll be in the years to come. But when a new gadget becomes part of the script of a TV show just a few months after its release, few would disagree that the potential for success is positively huge.

Even if the forthcoming Samsung Galaxy Tab becomes reasonably popular, you won’t hear anyone talking about their Galaxy Tab on hit shows or blockbuster movies. Such things don’t happen, and this is where Apple has the advantage. Besides, it looks more and more to me that the so-called iPad killers, however good they might be, are fated to be also-rans in the tablet marketplace.