From Day One of the arrival of the Apple Macintosh in 1984, many insisted Apple was missing the boat by not licensing its crown jewels, the Mac OS, to other companies. This theory had it that Apple would benefit big time as more and more computers bearing their operating system became available.

As some of you might remember, however, the Mac OS was actually free in those days. The few people who actually got online, and could afford to remain there for hours retrieving the files at a time when there was a hefty charge for such things, could legally download the files and copy them to floppies. If that wasn’t possible, you could always visit a friendly dealer, a Mac users group or a friend to make copies for you.

In the 1990s, that stopped, as Apple decided that the Mac OS should be a separate, standalone retail product, even though it was still designed strictly to run on Macs. However, that didn’t stop an occasional enterprising company from buying up old Apple ROMS, bundling them into their own hardware, such as portables, and selling unofficial clones.

At a time when Apple’s leadership lacked a long-term game plan, they relented and decided to actually license the Mac OS and reference hardware designs to several companies, small and large, to spread the joy. Certainly there were loud cheers both from the tech media and customers who felt they could now buy computers running the Mac OS without paying what was then a real Apple Tax, a far higher price to buy a real Mac.

I suppose Apple didn’t consider the laws of unintended consequences, because the contracts were poorly crafted. Indeed, I would think that the executives who negotiated those deals should have been fired forthwith, although I suppose most of them departed anyway when Steve Jobs returned to the company.

In any case, such aggressive startups as Power Computing went after Apple’s core market of content creators with a vengeance, building cheap hardware that happened to run the Mac OS and undercutting Apple at every turn. In the quest for rapid growth and short-term profits, I suspect Power Computing’s executives didn’t realize that they, and other licensees, were cutting off Apple at the knees and would ultimately kill the company, and the operating system they licensed.

Steve Jobs put a stop to this deal from hell in a very smart fashion. The contract licensed Mac OS 7, so he renamed the next version as Mac OS 8 and crafted a proposed contract with terms far too onerous for any of the existing licensees or any potential licensee to accept. Apple bought Power Computing in a $100 million all stock transaction, the main benefit of which was Power’s wonderful online order system. That formed the basis for Apple’s online store, by the way.

In any case, with the clones history, Apple shored up its bottom line, shuttered poor-performing products and development initiatives and reemerged as the huge success story it is today.

Despite the ongoing demands by some elements of the tech media that Apple needs to open up its ecosystem and allow third parties to legally use its operating system, it’s clear to me that it won’t happen anytime soon or ever. Apple continues to make record profits, and sales of iPhones and Macs continue to grow at rates that surpass most of the competition.

How can you argue with success?

Well, I suppose if you’re running another company, saddled with the garbage that Microsoft continues to foist on you, there must be a huge incentive to license a different operating system, and it’s clear to me that Dell, as a key example, would jump at the chance if Apple decided to let them install Mac OS X on their PCs. Indeed Michael Dell has already been quoted in one email that he’d be delighted to do so if the opportunity arose.

However, in the retail marketplace, Apple’s products are unique. Although they use industry-standard parts for the most part, their products continue to set the trend for style and they are even environmentally friendly nowadays. So when you buy an iPhone, an iPod, a Mac or any other Apple gadget, you are getting something that not only looks pretty, but works beautifully with one of the best reliability rates in the industry.

Except for a handful of premium PCs from Sony and some specialty makers, the average PC looks dull, undistinguished, and has little beyond a nameplate to separate it from the competition. Does Apple really want the Mac OS to run on such products? Besides, Apple would likely confront the same nightmare that Microsoft regularly deals with, making the operating system run properly in tens of thousands of possible system setups over which they have no control whatever.

More to the point, Apple is in the business of making money, and they’d have to sell may times more software licenses before they’d earn enough profits to match what they lose from hardware sales. That’s because cloners would undercut Apple’s products at every turn, and sacrifice profits in order to build market share. In other words, Apple would likely put itself in the same perilous position that existed in the mid-1990s before Steve Jobs stopped the cloning.

This hasn’t kept hobbyists from building their own Hacintoshes. In the end, some of these people might even decide that it’s less irritating and time-consuming just to buy regular Macs. There’s also the issue of Psystar, that little company that continues to flout Apple’s user license, despite losing out in court. Whether they are a stalking horse for a bigger company, or just a handful of eager young people who threw the dice and hoped it would pay off, they will be gone soon.

Yes, there would be lots more options should Apple decide to license its operating systems. But it’s just not going to happen.

When I first read Apple’s press release that the unexpectedly famous App Store had 100,000 offerings, and that two billion files had been downloaded so far, I wondered how we got there in the first place.

{In case you’re wondering, the phrase “jump the shark” was first coined to describe TV shows whose best days were behind them.)

The iPhone first arrived in June 2007, but Apple had no SDK or retail store for iPhone apps. You were restricted to Web-based apps, in the fashion perhaps of Google’s forthcoming Chrome OS. After lackluster success and lots and lots of clamoring from developers, Apple created the App Store, and on the surface it has been a stellar success.

But it’s been a difficult ride, and some developers have been left on the sidelines as the freight train sped past. Indeed, a few of them are complaining about the tight controls and arbitrary rulings about which apps to accept and which to reject.

In a recent interview with BusinessWeek, Apple’s senior vice president for worldwide product marketing, Phil Schiller, seemed quite candid about why Apple put its policies in place, and the potential benefits to the end-user. Consider, for example, how an unstructured app environment would function in light of those recent iPhone malware outbreaks.

Now before you begin to fret over such matters, those security issues evidently impact only those who have opted to jailbreak their iPhones, and, when setting it up, do not change the default password. So if you do the first, make sure you pick a strong password you should be all right, although I think the whole concept of jailbreaking has now been brought into question. As the doctor said in that old joke, when told that it hurts when the patient does something, “don’t do that!”

However, it’s also true you probably need tighter controls over a smartphone ecosystem. I mean, on a regular personal computer, an Internet vandal may steal your passwords. On a phone, they’ll also record all your personal and business phone conversations. It’s bad enough that the GPS tells “them” where you are, so why make your phone even more vulnerable?

I can agree with Schiller that Apple is simply playing the role of dealer here, in the same way that a store in your neighborhood decides what inventory to carry, and what products to reject. In order to be accepted for the App Store, the product must actually work and not present or exploit a potential security lapse. With the iPhone’s Parental Controls feature, there is at least some level of protection against your kids getting explicit products, which allows Apple to open up the spigots somewhat for the rest of its audience.

The trouble arises because of those gray areas, where the fate of an application may rise or fall on someone’s judgment call that may have questionable merit. Originally, a developer had no way of knowing where they stood in the pecking order, to get an idea of how long it would take for the final verdict. Some developers have protested loudly, in public, about decisions they felt weren’t justified by the facts. You have probably read about them, and perhaps they have a solid case. The process ought to be more dependable.

On the other hand, Apple says they’re getting upwards of 10,000 new submissions every single week. Some are updates to existing products and others are brand new. With a workload like that, they are clearly going to make lots of mistakes, and perhaps developers should be more patient or try harder to work with Apple to overcome potential objections. But when your income is at stake, and even a few day’s delay means potential lost income, I can see why emotions might get frayed.

In any case, even ultimate acceptance doesn’t guarantee an app’s success, any more than a book that is published is assured of best seller status. Indeed, I’ve talked to a few developers who made a fortune on one title, but had follow-up titles fare badly. That’s the luck of the draw, and nothing is guaranteed.

Yes, I suppose some developers might look at the fairly open Android platform or perhaps the Windows Mobile Platform as possible alternativces because they’re disgusted with Apple’s way of doing things and their tight control over the iPhone platform. However, the grass isn’t always greener. The relative freedom of Android also means that there are different hardware designs, varying levels of support for operating system features and no guarantee that your app will work on a large number of the available devices. Talk of gambling.

With Microsoft, their latest developer program reportedly includes a service charge every single time you submit an app for approval. If it’s rejected for any reason, even for an insignificant change, you are forced to pay yet another fee to resubmit. To Microsoft, everything they do is a potential profit center.

The real issue with the App Store is that everything is really quite new, and Apple is clearly learning from its mistakes. Remember that they don’t make money from that venture unless the developer makes money, so they are forced by the circumstances to try to do things properly, and they might even get there one of these days.

At the risk of offending some of my readers who believe that Apple can do no wrong, let me put my cards on the table. Apple is not your friend, even though the company is widely admired. It is a great money making machine, too, with products that have become cultural icons, such as the iPhone and iPod.

Certainly Apple has messed up big time on more than a few occasions. The dark days of the 1990s nearly signaled the end of the company as we know it. In those days, the company’s leadership actively sought merger partners, and I bet most people — other than Apple’s competitors — are glad that it didn’t happen.

When Apple does screw up these days, you have to wonder what they were thinking and what sort of market research they conduct in order to decide on products and product features. Or is it simply a matter of Steve Jobs being the decider on everything without regard to practical value?

Surely the Cube is an example of what may have been nothing more than an indulgence on the part of Jobs. At the time, commentators regarded it as a modern day version of the original NeXT personal computer, which was also cube-shaped. It’s also certain that Jobs didn’t want to see it discontinued, but ultimately how to bow to the reality of ongoing sales shortfalls, even after the price was sharply reduced.

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All right, this is becoming familiar. Most of you have seen those benchmarks that indicate that Internet Explorer 8 performs worse in almost every respect when compared to most recent browsers. Even Opera, which has of late lagged in performance, fares better, and IE8 is also decidedly inferior when it comes to passing the infamous Acid3 test, a rigorous benchmark that assesses the ability to accurately render sites.

So along comes a claim from Microsoft that we shouldn’t fret. IE9, due to arrive at some indefinite time in the future, will close the performance gap. Despite poo-pooing the idea, Microsoft is now admitting that they have found a way to boost JavaScript speeds, and you’ll see the results in the next version of Internet Explorer.

Now as an early reality check, consider that Microsoft’s Acid3 score is presently 24, but they hope to improve that to 32 with early IE9 builds. At the same time, Chrome, Opera and Safari all rate at a perfect 100, whereas the beta version of Firefox 3.6 scores 92.

When it comes to Microsoft’s excuses, haven’t you heard this nonsense before?

Welcome to the famous Microsoft broken record. They sing the same tune again and again. They announce the latest and greatest version of a product, extolling all of its real or imagined features. The tech writers who aren’t lining up for freebies from Microsoft — or hoping for some — reveal that the new product or service is actually inferior to the competition and fails to do what was promised. Microsoft, in turn, grudgingly admits to some of the shortcomings but says, no matter, they’ll get it right next time.

Have you heard of Windows Mobile 6.5? Well, maybe not. This “interim” release has gotten lukewarm receptions from the critics, and is an also-ran in the mobile marketplace. Indeed wireless handset makers are quickly dumping Windows Mobile and embracing other operating systems, such as Google’s Android.

Microsoft, in its defense, says that version 7 will be the be all and end all of smartphone systems, and that it’ll arrive some time next year. So just be patient, and you’ll have something that will surely suck less. Of course that assumes that Windows Mobile 7 won’t arrive with Microsoft assuring us that version 7.5 or 8 will be the ultimate edition.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s only a matter of time before Microsoft offers the same excuse about Windows 7, before they give it a shave and a haircut, play another game of interface musical chairs, including a new name. You don’t believe me? So how did Vista become 7 in the first place?

I find it incredible that people fall for this bait and switch scam over and over again. How many times can Microsoft get away with their lame excuses for building mediocre products before tech writers really take notice and call them on their abject failures to demonstrate true creativity?

Now this is not to say that Apple isn’t above promising a better tomorrow with an inferior product. The original version of Mac OS X was barely usable. Indeed, I remember returning to Mac OS 9 to get real work done, and only switched back to OS X to write articles and books on the subject.

Indeed, Steve Jobs admitted, during the rollout presentation to the media, that version 10.0 was designed strictly for beta testers and early adopters and that it was missing critical features, such as CD/DVD burning. He assured everyone that these shortcomings would be addressed in time.

When 10.1 arrived, restoring features and improving performance, Apple gave the upgrade CDs away for those who picked up the packs from dealers. They charged “shipping and handling” if you didn’t have a nearby dealer or just wanted the convenience of having it sent directly to your home or office. And, no, I won’t get into the controversy that arose over what many regarded as an excessive service fee for something that should have been free regardless of how you acquired it.

To my way of thinking, Mac OS 10.3, alias Panther, was the first version to truly come into its own, and its gotten better ever since. That said, I realize that some of you feel Apple reached the pinnacle of interface design and features with the original Classic Mac OS, and, 10 years after Mac OS 9’s development wound down, you’re still hoping for some of its lost features to return.

You just know that the original iPhone OS was also lacking in core capabilities, such as cut, copy and paste, which we took for granted years ago when the first Macs arrived. It seems incredible that you had to wait two years for version 3.0 to arrive and deliver a useful version optimized for a handheld computer. Why did it take so long to begin with?

As I said yesterday, Apple resides in its own glass house, and they do make mistakes, some that seem awfully dumb on the surface, but they also seem better able to fix the things that go wrong. They no longer need to make excuses or tell us to wait till next year, and quite often Apple exceeds our expectations. That’s a concept Microsoft still fails to comprehend.