It’s hard to know whether it was all prearranged, or whether Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, the hosts of this week’s AllThingsDigital conference, make a habit of asking softball questions of prestigious guests, but there were no attempts to pin down Steve Jobs on the critical questions. Call the performance closer to a Larry King interview than one involving the ever-acerbic Bill O’Reilly.

Regardless, Jobs made a number of fascinating statements, delivered with obvious sincerity in his typically direct fashion. Unlike just about every other CEO on the planet, Jobs never minces words, and says — or appears to say — exactly what is on his mind, whether you agree with him or not. However, most of his views appear to be right on the money, although I expect some of the armchair media critics will try to spin those statements out of control.

Take, for example, his pointed comment about the decision to block Flash from Apple’s mobile platforms: “We have the courage of our convictions. We’re going to take the heat because we want to make the best products in the world for our customers. If we succeed they’ll buy them, and if we don’t they won’t.”

In other words, Apple customers can make Jobs reconsider Flash simply by not buying the products, or purchasing them in smaller numbers. It’s really that simple. Right now, the surveys demonstrate that only a small number of iPhone and iPad customers really care that Flash isn’t there. That is an extremely significant fact that Adobe clearly has difficulty facing.

But as I wrote in yesterday’s column, Adobe quickly found a way to build a version of the Wired magazine app for the iPad that’s fully compliant with Apple’s current development standards, one that doesn’t depend on Flash. It is also a sales success, so Adobe clearly wasn’t left in the lurch. They can change, and they can continue to provide useful tools for content creators even if Flash disappears, as it inevitably will.

Jobs also seemed to throw cold water on the possibility that you’ll be seeing a major revision to Apple TV anytime soon. Even if the rumored $99 iPhone-based streaming version does see the light of day, it will just be another experiment in a long line of experiments. In the end, the current state of affairs with cable and satellite providers makes it near impossible for third parties to build competing set-top boxes, even if they are far better than the bundled versions.

Sure, today’s TiVo is probably superior in most respects than the ones you rent or get for no cost. But therein lies the dilemma. How do you compete against free? Even at $10 per month for a product than delivers maybe 75% or 80% of what a TiVo offers, why buy the latter? The fact of the matter is that TiVo is making most of its money from software licensing.

If Apple tries to build a full-featured set-top box, they will face the very same hurdles. Adding one more box does little more than increase the clutter without solving the fundamental problems with the TV industry. As Jobs says, “The only way that’s ever going to change is if you can really go back to square one, tear up the set-top box, redesign it from scratch with a consistent UI across all these different functions, and get it to consumers in a way that they’re willing to pay for it. And right now there’s no way to do that.”

So Apple TV, however Apple redesigns the product, is destined to remain a hobby for the foreseeable future.

Another significant statement to come out of the session was the comparison of the PC and mobile platforms to trucks and cars. Over time, the PC (the trucks) will become a tool primarily for creative people. Those who use computers to consume content will gradually migrate to such portable devices as the iPhone and an iPad (the cars). As much as Apple continues to expand sales of the Mac, Steve Jobs understands that the PC era is pretty much over, and it’s time for the next great thing to take its place for most consumers.

To Apple, it’s their mobile platform. At the same time, Microsoft clearly hasn’t a clue how to survive in this brave new world. The lion’s share of their profits still come from Office, Windows and related software. Attempts to expand beyond these core product lines have had at best mixed success, which is why Microsoft conducted another round of executive musical chairs very recently.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, the man at the top, Steve Ballmer, is clearly unable to clean up this mess and move the company beyond its dinosaur technologies. Microsoft in the 21st century is very much in the position of IBM in the 1980s, and they will continue to suffer greatly as a result.

This doesn’t mean that another company can’t supplant Apple some day as the biggest tech company on the planet. But so long as Apple, under Steve Jobs or a successor CEO, continues to operate as an aggressive startup, that’s not going to happen quickly or easily.

After crying the blues to the government that big bad Apple won’t let them pollute the iPad and iPhone with Flash, Adobe has finally demonstrated to one and all that they can actually survive anyway.

So is anyone surprised?

According to published reports, Adobe has created a new digital publishing platform for magazines for the iPad, using Apple’s Objective-C, so the apps will be acceptable to Apple. The first demonstration of this new technology is available in the iPad edition of Wired magazine, which, despite its $4.99 purchase price per issue, is reportedly sitting at or near the top of the charts at the App Store.

Yes, Objective-C. Originally, Wired had planned to use Adobe’s Flash to iPhone conversion tools, but since Apple gave that approach the heave-ho, Adobe evidently went back to the drawing board and found a workable solution that, in fact, supports Apple’s methodology. Can you believe that?

You might not believe this, but Adobe wants us all to know that ditching Flash for Wired’s iPad app is actually a good thing. According to David Burkett, vice president and general manager of Creative Solutions for Adobe: “Adobe’s work with Wired has resulted in a digital magazine format that creates an immersive experience, allowing a publication’s unique content, look and feel and advertising to stand out in the digital realm. We aim to make our digital viewer software available to all publishers soon and plan to deliver versions that work across multiple hardware platforms. It’s safe to say that if you are already working in InDesign CS5, you’ll be well on your way to producing a beautiful digital version of your publication.”

Of course, you can find hypocrites at lots of companies. Adobe is doing what’s necessary to preserve a customer, Condé Nast, publishers of Wired and other magazines, and get their content onto the iPad without suffering the wrath of Apple.

Now understand that it’s only been a few weeks since Apple announced iPhone 4.0 and those controversial restrictions against using third party tools to build iPhone apps. But it didn’t take long for Adobe to find another solution.

Adobe, of course, had no choice. Apple isn’t going to relent, and the iPad, even without Flash, has sold two million units and counting in the first 60 days, even though the chances of finding the model you want at your local Apple Store, Best Buy, or an Apple dealer in the other countries in which the iPad is available, are slim to none.

If Apple could meet that demand, how many more units they have sold? Another 100,000? More? Can you even guess? That’s why I suggested yesterday that the iPad is going to equal or exceed the sales of new Macs right out of the starting gate. There are also surveys showing that more and more people are planning to buy one in the business world, so the sky’s the limit.

In any case, since Adobe clearly knows how survive within the confines imposed by Apple, you have to wonder what they might do about Flash. They’ve already issued an update offering extra HTML5 capability for their Dreamweaver Web authoring app, so they are clearly seeing the handwriting on the wall, even if it takes a few years before the growing saturation of Apple mobile products makes use of the aging Flash technology unproductive.

Of course, Apple’s critics don’t see it that way. According to some online commentators, the lack of Flash means that Apple “is the new AOL and new Microsoft,” and is forcing you to experience the Internet within a “walled garden.”

Walled garden?

Now let’s be clear. AOL in its heyday was a decidedly different breed of cat. At first, your online access was limited to AOL’s home-grown content and you couldn’t even email people outside the service. The ability to access Internet email, the Web and other features was added slowly, haltingly, often using primitive add-ons that made the process torturous.

Only in its last days as a proprietary service did AOL begin to offer anything resembling a decent browser, first based on Mozilla’s Gecko engine and now Apple’s WebKit.

But Apple resides in a different universe. Apple isn’t blocking Internet access, just Flash. The Safari browser on your iPhone and iPad use the same open source rendering engine as the browsers used by Google, Palm, Nokia and, soon, RIM for the BlackBerry.

Yes, I suppose they can say you’re in a walled garden because of those often-arbitrary restrictions on apps, but with over 200,000 selections, the few that have been rejected don’t seem to have made much of a difference for the vast majority of Apple’s customers.

And if Adobe wants to show up Apple, all they have to do is demonstrate a version of Flash on an iPhone or iPad that meets Apple’s objections. Is that so hard to do? Evidently, because even the version of Flash that’s being shown on the next version of Google’s Android OS is a buggy piece of garbage. Adobe may be dragged into the future kicking and screaming, but they have no choice but to learn how to handle the truth.

According to Apple, in less than 60 days some two million iPads were sold. This is ahead of most early estimates that pegged sales for the entire first year at five or six million. What makes the figures more compelling is the fact that Apple remains seriously backordered, and the product is only beginning to roll out internationally.

What, pray tell, might sales be if Apple could promptly fulfill the pent-up demand? It’s clear, based on these early figures, that the iPad is already poised to outsell Macs. What’s more, Mac sales do not seem to have been impacted negatively, which means that Apple has succeeded in building a totally new income stream that may grow beyond anyone’s expectations in the years to come.

To be realistic, though, we’re still looking at sales to early adopters, people who are psyched to buy any new Apple gadget on the basis of the hype and its promise. It will probably take a year or two to know if the iPad truly has legs, and that will be obvious if sales continue to grow at a tremendous rate.

It is certainly encouraging that the iPad’s customer satisfaction surveys are off the charts, over 90%. Yes, other companies are struggling to enter this market with their own would-be iPad killers, but there’s nothing to indicate any competitor can deliver an operating system that’s near as elegant, snappy and easy to use.

That is the typical problem with Apple’s rivals. They can yap all they want about the wonderful features their hardware contains that Apple has yet to offer. They can even make their smartphones and tablets look pretty. That shouldn’t be hard for a team of smart industrial designers, assuming they are allowed to let their creativity flourish. To be sure, some of those products actually look pretty nice. But what about the operating system?

The highly-touted contender, Google Android, suffers from the ills of other open source operating systems, which is that it lacks the spit and polish of a commercial product. So there many be features that trump Apple’s in some fashion, simply because they work better or perform functions that are not yet supported on the iPhone OS. But loads of customers who have compared Android against iPhone often conclude the former feels unfinished, performs inconsistently, and, in general, conveys the impression that it’s a beta product.

The situation for the people who have purchased Android OS phones is murkier than that, however. Wireless carriers run the show, which means they decide when and if you’ll receive software updates. With a fair number of hardware configurations available, there’s no guarantee that any particular app will even run on your Android smartphone. This becomes particularly irksome now because, beginning with Android OS 2.2, you will finally be able to offload apps from the device’s built-in memory to the connected Flash card. Imagine that! And since there’s no guarantee that millions of Android users will be able to upgrade nor or ever, it ends up as a pretty chaotic situation.

Worse, the Android OS so far barely pays lip service to the enterprise, which means that tens of millions of potential customers can’t use these products because of corporate policies. At the same time, according to AT&T, some 40% of all iPhones are sold to businesses, and Apple continues to add more and more enterprise features. Yes, Apple primarily goes after the consumer, but when that consumer works for a large company that routinely deploys hundreds or thousands of smartphones, that can add up to an awful lot of sales. No wonder the iPhone’s market share is closing in on BlackBerry, the perennial business favorite.

There’s also clear evidence of dumping Android OS product into the channel. The latest two-for-one offers from Verizon Wireless are designed to get as many units into the hands of customers as possible, once they sign those long-term contracts. indeed, the product itself means little. All they want to do is sell you big buckets of minutes. The handset you buy may be a piece of crap, but once they hook you in, they hope you’ll renew when the contract is up and buy another piece of crap.

My personal experience with Verizon Wireless has been dreadful. Their customer support people can’t answer the hard questions. When I tried to resolve a billing issue for my sister-in-law recently — after she couldn’t make them budge — even the simplest comment brought the response that I was deluded. They even suspended her service two days later not because her payments were late, but out of spite. Those of you who are hoping the iPhone will soon be available from Verizon Wireless ought to be careful what you wish for.

In any case, when you consider Apple’s growing success in smartphones and now tablets, and how more and more people are using them in place of the traditional personal computer, I am convinced about the accuracy of my prediction for 2015: Most of the portable computing devices that people will take with them for business and personal travel will be smartphones and tablets. The PC era is definitely coming to an end, except for content creators who will, in increasing numbers, rely on Macs.

Since Microsoft has so far failed to move past the 1990s, Office and Windows, they are in deep trouble. It’s a sure thing that Steve Ballmer has got to go, but whether they will find a visionary CEO who can save the company from its own excesses is anyone’s guess.

Just days before Apple became the largest tech company on the planet, at least based on stock valuation, it was widely reported that the U.S. Department of Justice was looking into possible antitrust violations. The main focus of the investigation appears to center on iTunes, and the way Apple handles its contracts with the entertainment industry.

The probe was reportedly triggered by Apple’s response to Amazon’s efforts to gain a one-day exclusive on new music. Apple allegedly threatened to withhold promotion for a participating label’s product.

Such behavior wouldn’t make much of a difference, except that Apple controls roughly 70% of the online music marketplace in the U.S. Even when you factor physical stores into the mix, Apple remains well ahead of the pack, which also includes Walmart. So you can see why the authorities are looking into the situation.

At the same time, Apple’s decision to block Flash from their mobile platform and alter the iPhone SDK to prevent you from using third-party tools to create software has also drawn attention. But I expect it’s iTunes that’s getting the lion’s share of attention.

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