In an article for entitled “The Microsofting of Apple?,” editorial board member Holman W. Jenkins Jr., writing an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, makes the silly mistake of comparing Microsoft’s predatory methods to compete with its rivals with Apple’s ascendancy in recent years. As with many of Apple’s staunchest critics, Jenkins’ lack of understanding of Apple’s financials and business plans are troubling. Worse, in this case we’re talking about the editorial pages of U.S.’s largest daily newspaper, and a Wall Street icon.

Consider the closing sentence: “An Apple that rolls out increasingly junky devices merely to lock more and more customers into the iTunes-App Store mall is one gloomy possibility.”

Let’s forget for the moment the characterization of Apple’s iPad and other recent products as “increasingly junky devices.” I see no evidence that Jenkins has more than a cursory level of knowledge about the iPad. He doesn’t say whether he attended Apple’s press event rolling out their tablet-based computer last month, or has otherwise had an opportunity to even touch one. Besides, he seems to be more concerned about Apple’s decision not to support Flash, since he feels that approach will deliver a subpar Web experience.

Flash, to Jenkins, is a good thing because it is “installed on 95% of PCs.” He repeats the “McDonalds argument” often voiced in favor of Microsoft ownership of the operating systems market by equating ubiquity with quality. He also wants us to believe that the efforts of Steve Jobs to move us from Adobe’s proprietary standard to the open multimedia standards being considered for HTML5 is somehow wrong. That, my friends, is the polar opposite of what Microsoft has traditionally tried to do, which is to lock people into their own standards not just to enforce their dominant position, but to make lots and lots of money from licensing fees.

Jenkins seems ignorant of the fact that Apple actually earns, at best, modest profits from iTunes and its various online divisions, including the App Store. The piece of the action Apple takes to run the system and process payments largely covers the cost of doing business.

How do I know that? Well, according to Apple COO Peter Oppenheimer, iTunes and the App Store, as of the last financial quarter, were “running a bit over break even and that hasn’t changed.” Sure, I suppose Jenkins can counter that statement by claiming Apple is lying, but that sort of behavior would violate a host of SEC laws. If they were caught fudging the books, they’d face fines and possible criminal penalties, not to mention a severe loss of confidence from the financial community.

The reason there is an iTunes and an App Store is to sell Apple’s hardware, from which they derive the lion’s share of their profits. Besides, whether you purchase product from iTunes is up to you, and nobody forces you to buy a single thing. In fact, if you choose to download something from the App Store, you can restrict yourself to the free stuff. When it comes to the iPod, you can transfer MP3 files to iTunes that you’ve acquired elsewhere (legal and otherwise), or just rip your own CD collection.

Why doesn’t Jenkins realize this? I don’t pretend to have an answer, except to suggest he’s been locked up in his ivory editorial tower for so long that he hasn’t come down to do any real world research.

The problem is that far too many of Apple’s staunchest critics view the company as an amalgam of Microsoft. If Apple gains a huge share of a market, such as digital music, that’s a bad thing. How could it be otherwise, since Microsoft pulled nasty stunts to own the operating system and office suite markets? Big equals bad.

One key reason why any of this is coming up is because Apple may surpass Microsoft in market cap this year. For those of you whose eyes glaze over from such buzzwords of the financial world, Wikipedia states that “Market capitalization/capitalization (often market cap) is a measurement of the size of a business enterprise (corporation) equal to the share price times the number of shares outstanding of a public company.”

In a sense it’s an artificial figure. If the stock market trends downward, a company is worth less, even though sales and profits may remain unchanged, and, in fact, are exceedingly high.

Now to be fair to Jenkins and others who have voiced similar wrongheaded ideas, it is fair to criticize Apple about the lack of Flash support. Certainly customers are being inconvenienced, and the iPhone and now the iPad will definitely not offer a full Web experience until this shortcoming is somehow remedied. It’s not as if Flash will go away tomorrow, or the next year. Far too many Mac and PC users have Flash, and it would require lots of work for Web developers to remove such content and seek other solutions.

Even then, what other solution would they choose? Sure, there is a growing level of HTML5 support in non-Microsoft browsers, but two thirds still use Internet Explorer, and for that app you’ll still need Flash.

One can always hope Apple and Adobe will kiss and make up and deliver a Flash solution for the iPhone OS. Despite all the posturing from Steve Jobs at public and private meetings, that would still be the most reasonable solution.

But lack of support for Flash won’t turn Apple into another Microsoft. When he makes claims of that sort, Jenkins simply demonstrates that he is nothing more than another clueless pundit.

As I read the complaints about the lack of a Web cam and “true multitasking” on the iPad, I’m reminded of the complaints folks voiced years ago about the original Mac OS. In those days, as I mentioned in yesterday’s column, Apple cobbled together a cooperative multitasking system to allow you to run more than one app at a time. But since it depended on apps playing nicely with each other for decent stability, things didn’t always work so well.

It did work, and got the job done until Mac OS X arrived with its preëmptive system. But that didn’t stop the complaints, since Mac OS X also lacked many features lots of Mac users had grown to love — or at least accept — over the years. Slowly but surely, some of those capabilities have been restored, but others, such as the ability to print a Finder window, are still missing in action, although such features can often be found in third-party products.

The typical Windows advocate will rightly remind you that their preferred operating system has many features that Apple hasn’t adopted or adapted. Just take a little time to explore the Control Panel features of Windows 7 and you’ll find loads of settings that have no Mac OS X counterpart. Then again, do you really need all those things? If you do crave more ways to configure your Mac, you will discover a rich selection of Terminal commands to accomplish these tasks or just check out an app such as TinkerTool, which puts a friendly face on loads of ways with which to customize your Mac.

As you recall, the iPod got its share of brickbats from people who insisted you really needed an FM tuner as standard equipment. Now I have had iPods almost since Day One, and I have not missed an FM radio. If that’s what I want, I have plenty of receivers at hand in my home, and the one in my car works just fine, thank you. Besides there are accessory tuners that’ll accomplish that task, so why force people to pay for features they won’t use?

Indeed, Apple VP Phil Schiller was once quoted as saying that good design is not just a matter of adding features, but knowing which features to remove, or not include in the first place. It’s very easy for a company to create a PowerPoint presentation with bullet points listing all the capabilities the competition offers, the better to figure out which ones they need to add in the interests of oneupmanship.

But from Day One, the Mac was sold as the “computer for the rest of us,” meaning real people who just wanted things to work without having to spend hours or days fiddling with all sorts of adjustments to make things function properly. I remember that iMac commercial where the announcer described what was needed to get online. He talked about “Step One,” then “Step Two,” but here was the clincher: “There is no Step Three.”

Apple has also been roundly criticized for forcing you to use your iPhone, iPod and the upcoming iPad within a fairly closed ecosystem, with iTunes as the centerpiece. However, if you’re buying an appliance that plays music, makes wireless phone calls and lets you access Internet content remotely — not to mention playing games of course — wouldn’t you prefer to just turn it on and sync the gadget with your copy of iTunes, rather than undergo endless steps to set things up?

Isn’t that to be preferred rather than cope with a device that offers more flexibility, but saddles you with silly and unduly complicated setup procedures to access those features? Why is it that so few of Apple’s competitors realize that charging people for features they don’t need or can’t use is just a waste of everyone’s money?

This doesn’t mean that Apple delivers perfect products each and every time. There are certainly situations where you wonder what logical process their product designers and marketing people employed to choose whether certain features were added, discarded or simply ignored.

Why, for example, did it take two years to incorporate cut, copy and paste into the iPhone software? Yes, the implementation works all right, but why wasn’t that critical feature not given higher priority? Did it really take Apple all that time to devise a workable scheme for moving text from one place to another?

At the same time, every hardware and software product is a work in progress. There are always tradeoffs that have to be made to ensure a stable user environment and to ship the product on time. Indeed, it’s a sure thing that most tech companies ship products prematurely, hoping to fix the most serious problems in the development labs or production lines over time. After all, early adopters can always download an update or send their units in for service.

The 27-inch iMac may be a prime example. It was critical to ship no later than late October of last year, to guarantee a robust holiday season. Certainly high sales have vindicated this approach, but what about those outbreaks of flickering screens and the yellow-tinged displays? Yes, the former was addressed with a pair of firmware updates, and the latter issue is being handled through customer service. But could they have done anything to prevent the problems from happening in the first place?

Not likely, so long as humans and not machines direct the design process, and do you really want the robots to take over?

You can bet the critics were howling when Apple’s press event and product information on the iPad failed to mention multitasking. How, then, do you run more than a single app at the same time? What if you need to integrate the content you create in, say, Pages with Numbers? Isn’t this all a throwback to the original Mac in 1984? Does Steve Jobs have an innate hatred of multitasking, just as he seems to abhor Adobe Flash?

Now in the old days, once multitasking got the official OK from Apple with MultiFinder, it was a cooperative system. That meant that each app had to play nicely with others when more than one was running. Most of the time the system worked well enough, although there were more than a few times when things came to a screeching halt.

With Mac OS X, the Unix core of the operating system is the traffic cop. So errant applications are limited in how they can mess up your Mac, which is not to say things are perfect, although switching from one to another should be a pretty seamless process. Indeed this preemptive scheme is a whole lot more efficient than cooperative, particularly when lots of apps are running at the same time.

Although Apple adapted Mac OS X for the iPhone, multitasking remains extremely limited. Not that it’s nonexistent, as implied by some less-informed tech pundits. Just watch those TV ads showing someone talking on the phone and checking Mail or Safari at the same time (which requires a 3G network of course). But when it comes to third-party apps, you can run only one at a time. Apple’s logic is that too many apps will drag down system performance and suck too much battery life.

Now it’s true that other smartphones somehow manage to support multitasking, although I gather there are also apps available that let you systematically quit apps when things get out of hand. So much for an efficient method, and I haven’t seen battery life estimates that account for lots of apps running at the same time.

Then again, how many iPhone users are actually suffering as a result of today’s minimal multitasking setup? I suppose if you’re in the middle of a Skype conversation and you need to do something else, this may present a problem, not that there have been an avalanche of complaints.

When it comes to the iPad, you’d think that, since it’s closer in concept to a regular personal computer and far more powerful than the iPhone, Apple might relent and implement a robust multitasking system. But so far they’re not mentioning the “M” word, although I suppose that things might change before actual product ships from the factory.

As a practical matter, the need for multitasking can probably be minimized largely by the OS suspending an app when you’re not using it, along with the use of Push Notification to allow the apps that aren’t actually running to communicate to you. This setup works rather well with AOL’s AIM. Even when the app isn’t running, I’m still logged into the system for the length of time specified in the apps preferences. When someone sends me a message, I get a popup notice. Of course if I press View to return to AIM, that step suspends any other third-party app I’m using at the time, but in the real world it’s not so irritating.

Now to be fair to Apple, they do seem to eventually figure out that customers may not like something and they will add or change a feature when necessary. So after a couple of years of clamoring for cut, copy and paste, Apple found a way to provide that feature in the iPhone OS, though I still regard the method as exceedingly awkward. But I don’t pretend to be an interface designer, and I can’t imagine that I’d be able devise a workable alternative.

There are also published reports that iPhone 4.0, no doubt due some time in the late spring or early summer, will introduce a full-fledged multitasking system for Apple’s mobile devices. That would satisfy those who object to the present way of doing things, assuming that stability isn’t negatively impacted.

But I do want to say flat-out that I do not believe Steve Jobs truly hates multitasking and is engaged in a secret plot to wean us from that dreadful habit. That would be perfectly absurd in any way you look at it, not to mention totally illogical. I mean if the iPhone and iPad could be easily made to multitask in the same fashion as the desktop version of Mac OS X, why would Apple withhold that capability?

The objections they’ve made, about performance and battery life, definitely make sense. On the other hand, I’m not a programmer either, and perhaps those of you who are would explain whether Apple’s concerns are valid or whether it’s all smoke and mirrors.

Humans are strange beasts. I wonder what an alien race might think of us if they come to Earth to observe our society and psychology. Consider how we root for the winner, and then, in an abrupt change of face, fervently hope for their defeat.

So consider Apple’s plight over the years. Despite a loyal fan base, it hasn’t always been so easy to get the press to come along for the ride, except for those who depend on Mac users for all or most of their traffic. Indeed, The Mac Observer had an Apple “death knell” section for years, where they’d recount the latest efforts on the part of the media to declare the company an abject failure.

It’s not as if Apple didn’t help things along. Consider all the missteps they made over the years. Despite having what was undeniably a superior product, a knock-off, better known as Windows, ruled the operating system empire then and now.

This is not to say that the Mac could have achieved total dominance in the same fashion as Apple has today with the iPod. But it wouldn’t be so one-sided a battle if Apple’s executives in those years had a clear-eyed vision for the future and not the failed vision of salespeople whose only concern was this quarter and the next, while innovation took a back seat.

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