Let me put my cards on the table. I’ve talked at length with Daniel Lyons, sometimes known as ‘The Fake Steve Jobs,” and he’s a really nice guy. So I was optimistic that Macs would get really responsible coverage when he joined Newsweek.

But I was wrong.

You see, Lyons’ serious columns have been seriously lacking in factual content and reasoned commentary. A particularly blatant example, entitled “Back to the Future,” appeared recently on Newsweek’s site. Again, I’ll withhold the link, but I think the title is sufficient for you readers to find the column if you wish.

Lyons posits that Apple is actually reliving the 1980s, where they ascended with the rise of the Macintosh, only to fall when Microsoft ultimately won the operating systems war. Unfortunately, Lyons believes that Windows 3.0, released six years after the original Mac OS, was the first version to be competitive with Apple. Those of us who actually knew something about the industry in those days realize that Microsoft really didn’t deliver a reasonably usable version until Windows 95 was launched, some 11 years after the arrival of the original compact Mac.

Now some of you might agree with me that it still didn’t match the Mac OS, but it was certainly a decent enough operating system.

In any case, Lyons concludes: “probably Apple’s biggest blunder with the Mac was refusing to let the companies license the software.” In other words, he joins other ill-informed tech writers in believing that, for Apple to succeed, they must follow the same strategy as Microsoft.

Once he decides to travel down that slippery path, Lyons tries to liken the iPhone to the Mac, suggesting that Apple’s closed ecosystem will conspire to prevent this hot-selling smartphone from long-term success. Evidently he believes the forthcoming “tidal wave” of Android smartphones will eventually do the iPhone in.

I’d like to respond to Lyons with a single word: “iPod.” As with virtually all Apple products, the iPod was sold as part of a closed ecosystem. Microsoft tried to feed software to the competition with its PlaysForSure initiative, expecting to repeat the success that came their way from the personal computer segment.

Do I have to remind you what really happened? Even today, the iPod commands 70% of the U.S. market, with Apple’s vertically integrated strategy still in place. More to the point, when they realized the old ways didn’t work with consumer electronics, Microsoft double-crossed its hardware partners and came up with their own attempt at an “iPod Killer” known as the Zune, also part of a closed ecosystem. You all know where that went — which is nowhere. The latest HD version, although it has received extremely favorable reviews, has failed to gain traction.

Now when Apple entered the smartphone segment, the market was already crowded with competitors from all the major cell phone makers. But in less than two and a half years, Apple’s market share has arisen to third worldwide, behind Nokia and the RIM BlackBerry, and the latter two have been selling such gear for years. More to the point, Apple’s profit margins on the iPhone are higher than that of any competitor. The App Store, with over 100,000 varieties and over two billion downloads so far, dwarfs the initiatives of other smartphone vendors, or wireless carriers for that matter.

As far as the Google Android is concerned, it is designed largely as a medium to place ads. That’s where Google earns money, since their mobile operating system is given away free. Just as important, there is no consistency among products, no method to enforce hardware compatibility among the companies who license this operating system. What this means is that your favorite app may work on one Android phone, but not another. If you need an update, you join all the other handset owners — other than iPhone customers — and visit your mobile phone store, so they can use their equipment to download and install the new software.

Now this doesn’t mean that the iPhone will ultimately rise to the top of the market in terms of sales. Steve Jobs has made it quite clear already that they don’t have to beat Nokia, Samsung, RIM, Motorola or other cell phone makers to be successful. So long as they can continue to come out with newer, spiffier models, and the native software and third-party apps continue to flourish, they’ll do just fine, thank you.

At the end of his column, Lyon’s concludes that, with the iPhone, Apple “may ultimately become a niche player once again, content to do a great job for a smaller audience.” Ever attracted to foolish cliches, he drops this one: “it’s deja vu all over again.”

In a sense he’s right, but not in the way he expects. Every time Apple tries something new, the critics line up to tell us why it’s destined to fail. As Apple continues to demonstrate in response, the reality is usually quite different. It’s unfortunate that Lyons again fails to realize that demonstrating a grasp of facts, rather than writing misleading speculation, will actually make him a credible member of the tech community. For now, I suggest he return to satire, where he actually seems to have carved out a “niche” for himself.

So far at least, the Mac platform has been relatively free of malware, despite continued growth of Apple’s market share. Although some skeptics continue to rant about the inevitability of a major outbreak someday soon, it hasn’t happened so far.

But all that presumes that most Mac users run their computers in the authorized fashion, although there are a fair number of hobbyists who have taken to installing Mac OS X on a vanilla PC, which thus become “Hacintoshes.”

On another front, Apple’s latest success story, the iPhone, originally arrived without third party software, other than those few developers who opted to create a Web-based service for Safari. This inspired many customers to jailbreak their phones to allow for the installation of real software, even if it was unapproved.

The practice of sidestepping Apple’s built in security model clearly has potentially dangerous consequences, as some of you have no doubt heard. Indeed, Intego, a Mac security software publisher, has issued a memo about the arrival of an apparently serious iPhone virus:

“Following the recent discovery of a worm that changes wallpaper on iPhones, Intego has spotted another piece of malware that attacks iPhones, one that is far more dangerous than the ikee worm. This hacker tool, which Intego identifies as iPhone/Privacy.A, takes advantage of the same vulnerability in the iPhone as the ikee worm, allowing hackers to connect to any jailbroken iPhone (iPhones hacked to allow installation of software other than through iTunes) whose owners have not changed the root password.”

Now there are actually no antivirus apps for the iPhone. At best, you can install the latest version of Intego’s VirusBarrier X5 and update the detection strings to at least eradicate the iPhone virus if it turns up on your Mac. That will help prevent you from passing it on to an unlocked iPhone, but there is no comparable protection on a Windows PC.

The easiest solution is, of course, to change the root password of your jailbroken iPhone, or, even better, don’t tamper with it. This sort of behavior may seem fun and all, and it will definitely allow you to access features that Apple has placed padlocks on. On the other hand, it also means that you are opening yourself up to a wider universe of unintended consequences, and the potential for malware infections is probably just a part of what might go wrong.

Returning to the Hacintosh community, it appears to be true that the Snow Leopard 10.6.2 update really does remove support for the Intel Atom processor, widely used on those ever-popular netbooks. Now I don’t have to remind you that Apple has no product available that uses that processor, and they are under no obligation to assist hobbyists who install Mac OS X on unauthorized hardware. Indeed, if you try to make a business of it, and attempt to stand up to Apple, you face being smacked down by a lawsuit.

When it comes to the Atom, no doubt the hacker community will come up with a solution to prevent 10.6.2 from bricking those netbooks. That’s how things work, and don’t be surprised if a 10.6.3 arrives that removes support for the workaround, although I rather think that this is not Apple’s priority. Sure, they’d prefer to sell you a genuine Mac, but if individuals want to violate the user license and install Mac OS X on unapproved hardware, that’s their problem. Apple’s not responsible for supporting those installations, and I would certainly caution you to avoid using a Hacintosh for business purposes. If it stops working, or you lose your data because of something that wasn’t Apple’s fault, where do you go for support? Sure, there are hobbyists out there who might assist, but it’s not as if they’re doing it for a living, and maybe they just won’t have the time to help everyone who needs it.

When it comes to jailbreaking your iPhone, I wonder whether that practice makes much sense anymore. It all began before there was an App Store and a rich selection of third-party software. Yes, perhaps you’ll gain access to parts of the operating system that are hidden on a regular iPhone, but does that really matter anymore? It comes down to why you’d want to open up your iPhone to the dangers of the online universe. Would you do it to get an application or a type of application that Apple won’t offer, or just to have the ability to finagle with the operating system?

Or maybe to just prove to yourself that you can do it, after which it may make perfect sense to restore the phone to its shipping condition and update with Apple’s latest version of OS X. Now that it’s clear that jailbreaking might make your iPhone susceptible to malware, I wouldn’t depend on someone coming up with software to protect you. You may be opening a door you were never meant to enter.

In recent weeks, it’s been reported that the worldwide market share of Windows has dipped below 92%. That’s still an impressively high figure, but what’s more interesting is that the arrival of Windows 7, despite all the advance publicity and positive reviews from Microsoft’s shills, and even some repeatable journalists, has failed to stem the gradual erosion.

This may not seem all that significant to you until you examine another market where Microsoft’s dominance once seemed unstoppable. Consider how the open source Firefox browser rose from zero market share five years ago, to over 24% in October of this year, according to Net Applications. The lamentable Internet Explorer, which is still the default on every single Windows computer on the planet, at least until that ballot box appears for European customers, is now estimated at 64.64%.

Yes, Internet Explorer’s decline may be measured in fractions of a percent each month, but that can really add up after a few years. So if Apple continues to grow its market, the naysayers may be singing a different tune about Microsoft in another five years, although it will probably require an awful lot of bad news and growing customer dissatisfaction to turn a gradual erosion into an unstoppable trend.

Now aside from Microsoft’s core operating system, email server and office software markets, they don’t do quite as well. I bet a lot of you believe that their Web server software sits a close second to Apache, which has a market share of 46.90% as measured by this month by Netcraft. Actually, Microsoft’s share is just 21.58%, with a several the applications filling out the rest of the market.

In other words, over 78% of the world’s Web servers are not run by a Microsoft product. I wonder how that state of affairs sits with Steve Ballmer and his minions.

Moving beyond software, Microsoft fares even worse. Despite trying their best to imitate the success of the iPod, the Zune music player, even the current HD model, did quite poorly. Other third-party music players actually fare noticeably better.

You wonder why Microsoft even bothers to dump what must be hundreds of millions of dollars into this losing venture. At least Apple’s executives were smart enough to pull the plug on the Cube when it failed to become a top seller, even though it was certainly a personal favorite of Steve Jobs.

Forget about Windows Mobile. It has become an afterthought. These days, most people lust after the iPhone, BlackBerry, or the latest iteration of a Google Android smartphone.

Sure, Microsoft may be good at bait and switch but they clearly haven’t a clue when and how to cut their losses when a product or service fails to gain traction. Instead, they simply come out with ever newer versions, often changing the names and a few surface details to fool people into believing that it’s all different. So we have Bing, the latest attempt at a search engine, and Windows 7, which is basically an update of Vista.

This is not to say that other Microsoft divisions are always losing money. Indeed their Entertainment and Devices Division, of which the Zune is a part, has actually shown a small profit in recent years. But this doesn’t necessarily make up for all the years during which they lost huge chunks of money. It doesn’t even compensate for the pathetic build quality of the Xbox, and I wonder how many of you remember Microsoft taking a billion dollar write-down to repair defective game consoles.

You didn’t hear about it? Well, it’s true the mainstream press did run the story, but they really gave Microsoft a pass on this huge problem, since there were few followups. If Apple took a similar markdown on the iPod, you can bet that the press would never stop talking about it, and it would even be featured on the 24 hour cable news networks. Reporters would be stalking Apple’s corporate headquarters, stopping every person to enter or leave any of the buildings in search of a scoop.

Why wasn’t that done with Microsoft? Why isn’t the press probing that company’s huge failure to build an operating system ecosystem that doesn’t cause customers billions of dollars in losses each year because of malware outbreaks? Maybe Microsoft is regarded as too large to fail, in the fashion on those multinational financial conglomerates that ripped off the world economy to the tune of trillions of dollars, yet still managed to hold governments hostage for bailout money.

Well, perhaps I’m getting a little too political there, but I do think that Microsoft has surely been responsible for so many serious failures, they deserve careful scrutiny from investigative journalists. What about those ex-employees who were given pink slips this past year? Wouldn’t some of them serve as possible whistle blowers about other potential corporate scandals at the world’s largest software company?

Or maybe we all know Microsoft is an evil empire, so nothing they do should come as a surprise to anyone.

Consistent with all those rumors, Mac OS 10.6.2, the second Snow Leopard update, appeared Monday in Software Update on millions of Macs across the planet. The most significant fix, according to Apple, addressed “an issue that caused data to be deleted when using a guest account.” There were loads of other changes, including a fair number covering security. Rather than simply repeat what’s already in Apple’s documentation, as other sites have done, just click here to find out what it’s all about. Depending on the kind of Mac you have, the size of the update will vary. On my Mac Pro, it came in at near 500MB, but it was just over 157MB on my 17-inch MacBook Pro. Curiously, the version for the Mac Pro was actually larger than the Combo update available direct from Apple’s site, which consumes 477MB. In any case, I settled on the update presented for each Mac without encountering any difficulties. As usual, unless one of the fixes is critical to your workflow, you might want to hold off running the update for a few days until the dust settles. There’s no harm just ignoring a Software Update notice. Meanwhile, it has been widely reported that the final release of 10.6.2 officially removes support for the Intel Atom chip, the low-power CPU that Apple doesn’t support anyway in any existing model. Did I say I don’t care one way or the other?