With plenty of justification, it’s common to complain when Microsoft makes changes in the Windows or app interfaces that seem there solely for the sake of change. Well, I suppose you’ll be told that those changes are actually based on focus group studies. You see, Microsoft’s customers wanted them all along. They told them so, but some of the design decisions simply don’t make much sense. How many, for example, really adore those notorious ribbons on Office that will soon come to the Mac?

Now it’s commonly believed that Apple doesn’t survey customers. Steve Jobs and the gang sit back, stretch out, have some cups of java, and decide the user interfaces we are all destined to see on future Apple products.

While that may, in part, be true, how often have you heard Jobs announce at a media event that Apple is fixing something, or introducing a new feature, because you asked for it? Clearly they are consulting customer feedback, using such information as a guide over what to change and how.

On the other hand, sometimes they do things that seem so peculiar you wonder what mindset was responsible for the silly decision.

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In an unexpected move, Apple has reversed the controversial decision blocking third-party development tools on the iOS platform. What this means is that software companies are no longer restricted to Apple’s own Xcode-derived environment, but can use their own. The proviso is that the app not download code as part of the process of running on your iOS device.

Now that, in and of itself, is a huge change in posture. Just weeks ago, Steve Jobs was railing against the use of third-party compilers, claiming that they hurt the advancement of the platform. At the time, it was suggested that other tools of that sort might not support key iOS features, such as multitasking, and would dumb down the apps to providing minimal support.

That was one change, but there is another, one developers have to cheer, and that’s release of actual written App Store guidelines. In theory, this means that if a developer plays by rules known to everyone, the process of getting an app approved ought to be trivial.

Of course, a published set of rules may not account for all possible situations, or gray areas, but at least the process will be far more predictable, or at least that’s how it seems. And, the new App Review Board should, in theory, help deal with app rejections in a more transparent fashion, and offer developers at least some hope that a bad decision can be overturned.

Now the specifics aren’t so important as the intent, which is to ease the restrictions of Apple’s walled garden. The question, of course, is why this announcement suddenly appeared out of the blue?

One possible reason is that Apple would rather change the rules on their own terms, rather than have them developed and enforced by the authorities in the U.S. and possibly Europe.

This isn’t to say that the agencies investigating Apple will suddenly shut down their probes. But the rules have changed, and that could satisfy potential objections before they’re made. Certainly Apple can afford to hire the best legal teams around, but the negative publicity, particularly if the headlines and 24/7 cable news networks provide coverage similar to the Antennagate affair, could hurt sales.

Consider that recent survey of smartphone owners, indicating that 20% might not buy an iPhone because of perceived problems with the antenna, even though Apple and others have demonstrated that competing products suffer from the very same shortcomings. A lot of people clearly don’t believe Apple, and an unknown number of iPhones might not be sold.

Of course, with Apple still quoting three-week delivery times for online purchases, maybe it doesn’t matter.

On the other hand, maybe Apple’s target isn’t the Feds or some overseas government agency. Maybe it’s all about competition, particularly from Google. As you know, the Android OS is gaining an awful lot of market share really fast. Almost every day, it seems there’s another new Android gadget available, and the mobile carriers that don’t carry iPhones are spending loads and loads of money to blanket the broadcast and print media with ads for such gear.

Even AT&T is pushing other products, knowing there’s a finite time for them to have the iPhone exclusive. Even the poor-selling BlackBerry Torch is getting heavy-duty advertising.

These days, it seems that Apple is spending a large share of marketing cash on the iPad. I see those spots almost everywhere, and they sometimes strike me as more ubiquitous than iPhone ads.

In any case, Apple is being inundated by loads of negative publicity from competing companies. An Android OS phone is open, Apple’s iOS is closed. It’s easier to develop for Android because there are fewer restrictions and a far greater chance of getting your app approved. What’s more, with the rapid growth of the platform, more and more developers are considering their options.

Now the iPhone doesn’t have to be number one to be successful. So long as Apple can report a significant increase in sales each and every quarter, it doesn’t matter if the competition is also succeeding.

But if the closed ecosystem is perceived as a disadvantage, and the government is watching over them, Apple might find that being politically correct is the best long-term approach.

Now I’m not going to suggest that the published App Store guidelines will eliminate all or most of those alleged arbitrary objections that developers complain about. It’s also not certain how Adobe might be impacted. Would Apple not just allow you to build an iPhone app from Flash, but allow Adobe to have a Flash plugin installed on an iOS device? So far, nothing is being said about any change in that situation.

In fact, I think that would be going too far, and it would severely undermine Apple’s widely publicized objections to Flash. On the other hand, if Apple and Adobe actually worked together to build a more stable version, one that was better able to handle complicated navigation requirements on a touchscreen, maybe. But I remain highly skeptical of that.

For now, I think the best you’ll see is a somewhat freer environment to build App Store apps, but that’s as far as it will go.

Just the other night, while watching the DVR playback of a TV show, I had to fast forward through several iPad ads. It seemed almost every other station break had an iPad announcement, the very same one! You just know Apple was sending a message, and not just to potential customers.

Now running the same spot repeatedly might also be an accident of scheduling. An agency places the ads in random rotation, and sometimes random means consecutive, or maybe Apple felt the demographics of the show in question were closely aligned with the most likely iPad buyers. Or they sought saturation.

But there’s more.

When the iPad was first announced, industry analysts couldn’t figure out what to make of it. They came up with sales predictions that were all over the price, but mostly seriously underestimated the real consumer demand. They couldn’t reconcile the iPad with existing attempts to sell tablet-based computers that, aside from some business sales, were abject failures.

One estimate put total sales for all tablets in 2010 at five million. The iPad confounded most everyone, except possibly Apple, with 3.27 million units sold during the first quarter. Published reports have it that production has been ramped up anywhere from two to three million copies per month, and now there’s an estimate from UBS analyst Maynard Um that some 28 million may be sold in 2011.

If Apple gets anywhere near that, they will surely put Mac sales way back in the rearview mirror. Even the most optimistic estimates for next year peg sales of Apple’s original flagship product as roughly four million per quarter in 2011.

Yes, I know there are loads of iPad pretenders due out by then, most of which will likely run Google’s Android OS or the Chrome OS. There’s also the misguided assumption that Apple must fail in the mobile space because of their closed platform. It’s all a replay of the Mac versus Windows wars, where Microsoft emerged triumphant.

Without going into detail, there were other reasons besides that closed ecosystem that hurt the Mac in days of old, including Apple’s chronic marketing failures. Indeed, when Apple did license the OS and hardware designs to third parties, just as they were repeatedly asked to do, that action nearly killed the company. The skeptics got what they wished for, but the results weren’t quite what they expected.

Nowadays, the PC industry is really scrambling after tepid summer sales. It doesn’t appear that sales of the Mac have been impacted; they are still reported to be increasing faster than the industry as a whole.

But what about the iPad? Is it cannibalizing sales of other computers, and, if so, which ones? The industry analysts who are looking at the situation suggest that sales of the cheapest PCs are tanking, and companies who staked a lot on the low end, such as Acer, are due to be hurt the most.

If that’s the case, the PC box makers deserve to lose because they underestimated the public’s taste. The typical netbook doesn’t show a whit of innovation. It appears all the PC companies did was to make them as small as possible, using the cheapest components available. Little thought was given on how a tinier form factor PC would function with miniaturized versions of the standard components. I suppose they also hoped that customers might even upgrade to something better, rather than, having been burned once, buying someone else’s product, such as an iPad.

So is the iPad killing the netbook? Certainly you can buy netbooks for less than $300, so why spend upwards of $200 extra for an unproven gadget, one that can’t even run standard Mac software? Does that make sense?

Of course the iPad buyer profile is probably complicated. Many buy them not to replace the family or office Mac or PC, but to have a simple portable device that will let them postpone a computer upgrade. An iPad may also serve as an extra gadget.

If one’s need of a computer can be met with the apps Apple provides on the iPad, or are available from the App Store, it may well be that the iPad can replace a personal computer in many cases, particularly if you are more of a consumer than a creator.

On the long haul, Steve Jobs has told you all about Apple’s future direction, although not everyone is listening. The iPad and its successors are meant as the personal computers of the future, the ones that will take over the industry for the vast majority of people. Yes, the traditional PC desktop and note-books will still be around, but sales will not be near as high. It’s not that the era of the PC is over so much as the likely prospect that it will morph into a different sort of machine. Apple is betting it’ll be the iPad, and the rest of the PC industry clearly doesn’t know what to think. They’ll try anything, from regular PCs, to mobile devices that may also have “Pad” in the name, perhaps to fool people into thinking it’s all the same.

As most of you know, it’s not the name but what’s behind it that counts.

I realize that Apple is being circumspect about the potential for the success of the latest iteration of Apple TV. Yes, there was that irony factor when Steve Jobs labeled it “one more hobby,” but hitting a home run is far from certain. Even at $99, the big question is whether millions and millions of customers will find it useful.

At least with the previous Apple TV, there was a built in hard drive to store some of your stuff. That way, you didn’t have to worry about interruptions in the streaming process or, perish forbid, the occasion when your Internet connection went down.

This is not a casual issue, folks.

The other day, I was watching a Netflix stream on the family TV, and twice the signal dropped and had to be buffered again. Understand that I have a very fast broadband connection, and the Wi-Fi signal strength from home office to master bedroom is rock solid. I had my iPhone present, and the signal strength displayed was absolutely normal. So one expects the problem may have been due to a glitch on the Netflix servers.

For the most part, my experiences with Netflix has been fairly positive. But the brief interruptions aren’t unusual, and sometimes I get a message that I’m offline. Yes, I grant this may also be due to a problem with my Blu-ray DVD player, which receives Netflix feed, but there are no obvious symptoms, other than the loss of a solid connection. Anyone else?

Now it may be true that Apple’s own servers will run more efficiently with their movie and TV show streams. But think back to the HTML5 streaming video of Apple’s media event last week. I observed signal glitches, where the picture froze and some of the audio from Steve Jobs repeated itself.

Before you suggest that’s also an artifact of my Internet setup, I was online with a colleague from France during that presentation, and he encountered similar symptoms. Well, maybe Apple’s servers were slammed, and don’t forget they have yet to deploy their new server farm in North Carolina. Once that’s in operation, perhaps we’ll see fewer signal saturation issues, assuming that was the actual cause of this problem.

This isn’t to say that DVDs don’t occasionally exhibit hiccups too, but seldom. And usually a fast removal and a quick wipe of the readable surface with a soft cloth clears up that problem. Unfortunately, with most Blu-ray DVDs, the act of stopping or removing the disc means that you have to endure the introductory material, usually trailers of films long gone, and scroll to the point where you left off. This is one of the limitations of Blu-ray, as very few offer an auto-resume function. I wonder why this feature wasn’t inherited from the original DVD format.

That being said, maybe Jobs has a point that Blu-ray is a “bag of hurt,” and won’t be supported on new Macs, at least for now. Apple is clearly betting on streaming video to ultimately dominate, and physical media to take a back seat.

Now maybe he’s right on for the long haul. But right now, the streaming glitches I see — and I don’t think I am unique — make the experience less perfect.

At the same time, I can see where simplifying Apple TV to the max may have an impact. People wanting to save on holiday presents might find the $99 price of admission not so daunting, and there is the cute factor. Put the tiny thing next to your flat panel TV, connect a couple of wires, and enjoy yourself; that is, assuming you have an account with iTunes or Netflix.

I also expect that more entertainment companies will come onboard to join Fox and ABC to deliver your favorite TV fare at 99 cents per episode. That is also a casual price. Even if you buy just a few shows a month, that can add up among millions of potential customers to a fairly hefty profit for the networks who are already suffering big time from diminishing audiences and ad revenues.

One criticism I have seen for Apple TV is the limit of 720p resolution, when Blu-ray, and some satellite Pay-Per-View selections, offer 1080p. That may seem a significant difference, except in the real world, where it takes a very large TV or close-in viewing to perceive the advantages of the higher resolution. Indeed, a large portion of network HD TV fare is at 720p, not 1080i, which is the best networks can actually deliver. It’s not a significant shortcoming, and Apple may have set that limitation to keep production costs down.

While I’m not going to make a prediction that Apple TV will no longer be a hobby by 2011, it may well be that sales will improve enough to justify release of the upgraded version. But it’s not going to take over the living room, not until the current marketing scheme, with free or cheap set-top boxes, gets an overhaul. And that’s not about to happen anytime soon. Maybe Apple is going to have to build a TV set to gain the upper hand.