The financial community has, in the past year, warmed to the inevitable success of Apple’s business plan, and you wonder why it took so long. For so many years, you see, the words “beleaguered” and “Apple” were synonymous. Whenever Microsoft released a new version of Windows, you just knew that the Mac couldn’t possibly compete, and it’s true that Mac market share was stagnant for oh so many years, but not now.

Even during the worst of last year’s economic woes, Apple managed to defy the experts, and for years the headline “Apple Beats the Street” were common. Wall Street, to use the famous garbled expression from our previous president, “misunderestimated” Apple.

In reporting its quarterly earnings Monday afternoon, Apple soared to record earnings again, with revenue jumping 32%. The figures included first-quarter net income of $3.38 billion and revenue of $15.68 billion. The new features represent Apple’s decision to adopt a new FASB standard for revenue calculation, which means they no longer postpone much of the earnings from sales of the iPhone and Apple TV.

More interesting, it’s clear that Mac sales are in the stratosphere again, with some 3.36 million were sold, up 33% from last year. This is particularly staggering when you consider that not only were Wall Street estimates exceeded, but Apple managed that feat despite ongoing delays in delivering new 27-inch iMacs to customers. Overall Mac desktop sales increased by 70%, with an 18% increase in sales of MacBooks and MacBook Pros.

On the iPod front, 21 million were sold, which is down a mere 8% from last year, which demonstrates that digital music players aren’t dead — yet. Some 8.7 million iPhones were sold. Although this represents an increase of 100% over last year for the comparable quarter, analysts might be disappointed, because they were talking about figures upwards of nine million. So maybe it’s true that the financial community is now demonstrating maybe a bit too much optimism over Apple’s achievements.

Then again, when a company doubles its sales over a year-to-year period, that’s supposed to be a good thing, but not among the airheads who masquerade as financial analysts and take your money and mine in payment for their alleged expertise at prognostication. Fortune tellers would probably do near as well.

Tantalizing us yet again about what’s going to happen Wednesday, Steve Jobs said, in the company’s earnings press release, “the products we are planning to release this year are very strong, starting this week with a major new product that we’re really excited about.” Yeah, I bet!

Apple also has close to $40 billion of spare cash around, and you have to wonder just what other corporate acquisitions are in their sights. I expect the pace to only increase this year, but I wouldn’t presume to predict just what companies might be takeover targets.

If you’re into looking at raw numbers and seeking trends, feel free to check out the actual figures at Apple’s site. I’m going to avoid the practice of other sites, where they just repeat press releases.

In its quarterly phone conference with analysts, opened by Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer, he detailed the figures, again repeating that roughly half the new Macs sold at Apple’s retail outlets are bought by people new to the platform. This continues to present troubling signs to Microsoft, although I expect their financials won’t be quite as bad for the last quarter in light of the arrival of Windows 7 and that perfectly awful ad campaign.

If you happen to listen to the playback of the conference call, you’ll see that Oppenheimer’s opening remarks were clearly written, and he’s not really good at public speaking. On the other hand, that is not a skill that too many executives have mastered. Maybe they should hire a professional announcer to deliver these messages, and, no, I’m not seeking that sort of work because a job of that sort would seriously impair my credibility as an independent journalist.

During the session, some of the questions were also fielded by Apple Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook, the man who is credited with much of Apple’s success, particularly during the six months sick leave Steve Jobs took last year.

As you might expect, Apple continued to express confidence in AT&T as the exclusive iPhone partner in the U.S., particularly plans to overcome network congestion issues in some cities. But did you really expect an announcement about Verizon Wireless, even if it’s in the cards?

As usual, the questions were mostly softball. There was an inquiry about problems with the App Store approval process, though. Cook replied that 90% of all submissions are approved within 14 days. He went on to say that most rejections are the result of buggy code, with a lesser number covering products with possibly objectionable content.

As I listened to the standard range of financial-related chitchat, I expected someone to ask one or two questions about the ongoing delay in shipping the largest iMac, and the reports of ongoing screen flickering and other problems. However, that was not to be, and you have to wonder why. As of the time this article was written, the shipping delay has jumped to three weeks, and there are unconfirmed reports of yet another fix to address display problems. At the same time, I’ve encountered none of these difficulties, but I am keeping my fingers crossed as my 27-inch iMac approaches the two month benchmark.

Depending on which version of the conventional wisdom you choose to believe, Apple is engaged in a battle to the death with Google and Microsoft. With the former, it’s mostly about smartphones, although Google is also working on a desktop operating system. When it comes to the latter, it’s the eternal conflict between the Mac and the PC, although Steve Jobs admitted long ago that Microsoft won the operating system wars.

Adding to the impression that Apple and Google are at loggerheads is the fact that the latter’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, resigned from the former’s board last year because of existing and potential future conflicts. Certainly he’d have to recuse himself from any meeting involving mobile device strategy, operating system plans, and that wouldn’t leave much room for anything else.

With Microsoft, those famous Mac versus PC ads clearly identify one of Apple’s biggest enemies. Even though it’s highly unlikely the Mac OS will ever supplant Windows in our lifetime — at least not before both are replaced by something perhaps even now being devised in someone’s garage — Apple delights in poking fun at the failings of Windows.

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Just the other day, I read yet another commentary from an alleged tech pundit claiming that the reason Apple didn’t conquer the world with the Macintosh in the 1980s was because they opted to keep the platform closed. Thus, there is no chance that Apple can overcome the Google onslaught and not fall behind in iPhone sales in the near future. Whether this year or the next, or the year after that, it’s inevitable and you can take that to the bank.

Of course, what these so-called pundits forget is that 2010 is not like 1984, and Apple has learned from all or most of its serious mistakes. And not licensing the platform wasn’t one of them. They tried that in the 1990s and it nearly killed the company, or perhaps these tech writers need to learn how to do a little research, as that information is also on Google, Bing or any search engine they choose.

There are loads of reasons why Apple didn’t conquer the PC world with a superior product way back when, and they can be blamed on the bad decisions company CEOs made over the years. I won’t cover all the details over here, except to remind you that, for a long time, Macs were, as still claimed, overpriced compared to comparably equipped PCs. Apple was quite shortsighted in those days, seeking to maximize profits from every single sale, rather than balancing margins against volume and moving towards the best combination of both. Those of you who paid upwards of $10,000 for a fully-outfitted Mac know what I’m talking about.

What’s more, Apple had a poor product strategy in those days, seeking to enter as many markets as possible rather than concentrate on the ones where they could make a difference. Yes, the LaserWriter and the LaserWriter II were legendary and, along with PageMaker and QuarkXPress, created the desktop publishing industry that survives to this very day. However, you could buy pretty much the same printers, using identical Canon parts, from HP. The key was Adobe’s PostScript, which was licensed to any manufacturer who was willing to sign a contract and pay the fee.

I won’t get into such products as the QuickTake digital camera, which was actually built by Kodak. You can’t say that Apple actually made a difference in that market, as similar if not identical products were sold under other brand names. When Steve Jobs took control of the company, he put a stop to the product explosion and decided to concentrate on Apple’s core strengths, the major part of which was the Macintosh.

Yes, Microsoft had long since taken control of the PC marketplace, but by focusing primarily on consumers, school systems and content creators, Apple was able to carve out a sizable and profitable market for themselves. Yes, maybe Apple still has a market share in the single digits, but when it comes to premium-quality personal computers, they are positively huge. More to the point, with some three million of them being sold every quarter, you can’t exactly call Macs insignificant.

When it came to digital music players, Apple wasn’t the first by any means, but they focused sharply on the limitations of existing models, and built the iPod. It was then integrated to the rest of the company’s lineup using iTunes as the focus for syncing content and offering music and videos. Lest you forget, iTunes is now the largest music retailer, ahead of Amazon and any brick and mortar store, including Wal-Mart. So Apple’s closed, tightly integrated ecosystem, made them number one and kept them there.

Yes, Apple may not achieve the same level of dominance among smartphones, but virtually every recent competitor has been influenced by the iPhone. After years of failed attempts to sell apps on mobile devices, Apple got it right with the App Store. Sure, they have had problems with delayed approvals, arbitrary rejections and so on and so forth, but with 125,000 offerings and over three billion downloads in a little over a year and a half, they are surely doing most things right. The closest competitor is Google’s Android platform, with roughly 20,000 apps, few of which are quite as compelling. Have you, for example, ever seriously considered an Android smartphone as a gaming platform, even for a single second?

This doesn’t mean that Google isn’t making serious inroads with Android. More and more companies are coming onboard to build products using Google’s OS, but a lot of those sales are coming at the expense of Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform, which is fading fast. After all, why pay money to license an OS from Microsoft when a handset maker can get a perfectly serviceable, and certainly more up to date alternative, free and clear? Indeed, a fast look at history demonstrates that Google acquired the fledgling Android platform in 2005 largely to compete against Microsoft. That iPhone didn’t exist at that time, except under deep secrecy in Apple’s test labs.

In the end, the smartphone market is too large nowadays to be dominated by any one company. There’s plenty of opportunity for Apple, Google, RIM, Nokia and the rest of the major players in the industry to carve out decent segments. There’s even opportunity for Microsoft if they can get their development act together. However, it is foolish to suggest that Apple is repeating the mistakes of the past by continuing to offer gear with full vertical integration. In recent years, they have shown that’s actually the best strategy for the products they build, and don’t forget that other companies, even Microsoft, have tried to imitate them, but so far without much success. But some pundits out there still haven’t a sufficient grip on reality to recognize these simple facts, or maybe they have a different agenda.

Since my recent column, “Does Windows 7 Make a Difference?,” was published, there has been an active debate about a new Microsoft window management feature, where a document is pinned at the edge of the screen a grabs half the display. You can place a second document on the other half of the screen to allow you to conveniently compare and edit both documents. This may be a useful productivity enhancer.

The window organization component is duplicated in large part with Cinch, a shareware utility for Mac OS X. But that raises the larger issue, which is whether Apple should provide a feature or leave it for independent developers to address.

Certainly there’s no way that Mac OS X can possibly cater to everyone’s needs. Among all the possible functions, Apple will pick and choose what they think works best and can be implemented with a typical degree of efficiency and elegance within a reasonable timeframe, and what’s best left to others to figure out.

Indeed, you probably realize that there are preferences for Mac OS X that remain hidden within the confines of the command line. If you’re skilled at working in the Terminal, or just copying and pasting the appropriate commands, you’ll find a rich repertoire of possibilities.

If you’d rather not mess with such things, there are also a number of utilities harness many of these hidden features, such as pinning the Dock on the top of the screen and in other locations other than centered on the left, right or bottom. In contrast, Microsoft will often add so many control panel functions in Windows that it becomes difficult for most users to figure out what works best. Some of you might feel that extra flexibility is a good thing, but most Mac users would rather just keep it simple.

At the same time, I’m sure most of you have a wish list for features already available from third parties that should have been in included in the Mac OS long ago, such as a less minimalist Open/Save dialog. Jon Gotow’s Default Folder X has been adding a host of essential functions for years, such as the ability to have the dialog rebound to the last opened file, and perform such Finder-related tasks as renaming a file.

However, the audience for Jon’s app is extremely limited, mostly to content creators who appreciate the added capabilities. Apple has made the Open/Save dialog more Finder-like in its behavior, up to a point. But if you want to take it any further, Default Folder X is essential. But at the same time, you wonder why Apple hasn’t waved a big check in front of Jon’s eyes and acquired the product. Yes, they will sometimes crib features from a third-party product, but they’ve also been known to acquire software that helps them reach a strategic goal more quickly. A legendary example is SoundJam, from Casady & Greene, the progenitor of iTunes. Indeed, one of SoundJam’s authors, Jeff Robbin, is now an Apple VP.

When Mac OS X arrived, Apple got seriously attacked by many long-time Mac users because so many features were lost in the transition. Indeed, the original Mac OS X Public Beta put the Apple logo in the middle of the menu bar, and it was only restored with limited functionality in the 10.0 release. Unfortunately, it hasn’t changed all that much since then, although again third parties will provide all or most of the flexibility of the Classic Mac OS version.

What makes this all the more difficult to consider is the simple fact that most of today’s Mac users never used any version of the Mac OS prior to 10.0. Classic is a relic of history, and Mac OS X’s Classic compatibility environment was discontinued long ago. Apple isn’t a company that looks back, witness the fact that they totally ignored the 25th anniversary of the Mac.

In all fairness, the original Mac OS and today ‘s version may share a number of basic features, but they are otherwise totally different animals. Whereas Microsoft has a difficult time dropping support for old products and making game changing upgrades to its software, Apple isn’t afraid to throw an entire platform or generation of Macs by the wayside in order to innovate and, frankly, to sell you brand new gear.

There are already predictions, for example, that the first generation Intel-based Macs, with 32-bit processors, will not be supported when 10.7 arrives. Such an approach would simply keep the three to four year compatibility cycle active, since Snow Leopard’s successor is not apt to arrive before early 2011, although it may be unveiled this summer during the WWDC.

In architecting 10.7, Apple will probably want to look to adding lots of flashy new features, the better to entice you to upgrade. At the same time, they will confront the inevitable dilemma about whether they should be restoring old features, embracing new ones, or just finding a good balance.