It’s a sure thing that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is one filthy rich dude. He could walk away from Microsoft tomorrow and have untold millions of dollars with which to live in the lap of luxury for the rest of his life, even if that exceeds 110.

I suppose one might envy such a position, but I’d rather look at the situation from the practical standpoint. Has Ballmer’s tenure meant good things for Microsoft and are the company’s stockholders getting their money’s worth?

My feeling is that the answer is a resounding no!

Take a look, for example, at Microsoft’s stock price in recent years. Sure, Wall Street has had a topsy-turvy existence, particularly as a result of the recent economic crisis around the world. However, using a basic five-year history, Microsoft’s stock price has been stuck in a fairly narrow range as stock prices go. I suppose that’s not a bad thing for investors who’ve seen their investments consigned to toilet status, but what about the world’s largest software company’s prospects for long-term growth.

Therein lies a tale, and I rather suspect Ballmer has lots of explaining to do.

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As you have probably heard, NDP Group, a well-respected market research firm, is reporting stellar sales for Snow Leopard. The long and short of their survey is that sales over the first weekend were twice that of Leopard its launch weekend, and nearly four times that of Tiger.

NPD Group’s vice president of industry analysis, Stephen Baker, tells The Night Owl that they are not releasing actual figures, though other estimates peg the number at two million. If sales through the remainder of the quarter remain extremely high, you can bet that Apple will likely have a press release touting that achievement ahead of their quarterly financials next month.

Of course, it’s also fair to say that two factors influenced those numbers. First is the $29 upgrade price for Leopard users, and the second is the mere fact that there are many millions of additional Mac users now than there were when Leopard came out.

From Apple’s standpoint, this is a great thing. It means they’ll recover the investment in development fairly quickly and if a large portion of eligible Mac users — those with Intel-based models — adopt Snow Leopard quickly, developers are apt to work that much harder to take advantage of the new performance-enhancing features. Right now, as with the very first PowerPC Macs, the things Snow Leopard can accomplish are largely theoretical. Except for Apple’s own system-related apps, such as the Finder, and a few third-party offerings, support for 10.6 is largely confined to compatibility.

Certainly it would be nice to see Adobe release a plug-in for Photoshop that supports Grand Central Dispatch, which would allow the more resource hungry rendering functions to harness the power of multicore processors. That approach would be similar to what Adobe did back when the PowerPC was first introduced. Then it was a free plugin, and it would be a good idea for them to do it again, assuming it is possible from a programming standpoint. Otherwise we’d all have to wait until next year for CS5 which, no doubt, will incorporate that support.

If such a plugin does appear, and the ball is certainly in Adobe’s court, it would also be really useful to see support for OpenCL, the Snow Leopard function that offloads work to the graphics chips. That would be a killer add-on, and perhaps it would fuel extra sales of CS4 until CS5 is closer to release. In other words, it would be a huge advantage for Adobe, since income generally drops in the months prior to the announcement of a major upgrade.

While most everything is surely coming up roses with Snow Leopard, there are still those lingering issues that make some media pundits skeptical. One of those scribes is even now telling us that we should give up Macs and move to Windows 7, even though the latter hasn’t been officially released. I won’t mention that person’s name because I used to think better of him, and don’t feel I should join the crowd in embarrassing him in print. Let his words do that.

Certainly Snow Leopard isn’t perfect. There are surely plenty of bugs left for Apple to fix, and some have seized on the fact that 10.6.1 came out a mere 13 days after the original release. But this is nothing new for Apple. All or most previous system releases have seen maintenance updates within a few weeks after the initial version hit the streets. Unless the system is afflicted with data-destroying bugs, most issues aren’t apt to be terribly serious. In large part, the initial releases are meant to address those various and sundry bugs that crop up during the dark days between declaring a Gold Master release and the actual product launch.

Surely nobody is surprised to realize that work on 10.6.1 clearly began well before 10.6 was sent to the DVD pressing plants, and that 10.6.2 and even 10.6.3 are probably well underway. How could it be otherwise?

Furthermore, even if Windows 7 is all or most of what Microsoft’s devoted followers claim, you can bet that developers are hammering away even now on lingering bugs not addressed before it was released to manufacturing. There will be incremental updates early on to address the most serious issues, and a Service Pack will appear probably within a year.

So it’s really unfair to pound Apple for simply behaving in a normal fashion for a tech company. You know software is buggy, and releasing a product is a balancing act. The marketing people want to deliver the goods as fast as possible to ensure high sales. Most developers are dedicated to their craft and want to make sure that all important defects are fixed. At some point in time, though, they have to recognize reality and give the green light. Of course, they also keep their fingers crossed that nothing critical was missed, and sometimes even their best efforts don’t quite succeed when the fruits of their labor finally goes on sale.

To look at the dark side, certainly Microsoft’s leadership would prefer that Snow Leopard falters in its early days. That hope may have fueled some of the worst criticisms. A few too many unfavorable or even lukewarm reviews can be enough to sink a product, or at least gut sales. Think about what happened with Windows Vista. Certainly Microsoft doesn’t want to go there again.

Now that the new iPods, iTunes 9 and iPhone 3.1 are in the wild, speculation is mounting about the next great Mac product introduction. But it doesn’t take rocket science to fathom what Apple might be up to when it comes to a product upgrade. You just look at the models that are getting long in the tooth and you’ll find some worthy contenders.

None of this depends on the supposedly sage prognostications from so-called industry analysts or some unshredded papers a rumor site might have pulled from a trash bin outside of Apple headquarters.

That takes us to the iMac and the MacBook. Both have form factors that haven’t been updated in a while. The MacBook is particularly old fashioned compared to the rest of the product offerings, as it’s primarily a relic of a previous design that was evidently kept in the lineup to give Apple both breathing space and a chance to boast they actually had a note-book that sells for less than $1,000 U.S.

Now as you well know, you can buy a decent PC note-book for a few hundred dollars less. Sure, the standard equipment and software won’t exactly match the MacBook, but Microsoft’s price comparisons don’t want customers to actually demonstrate intelligence in making comparisons. The apparent ongoing success of netbooks has to have some impact as well.

But Apple is between a rock and a hard place here. They do not want to sell junk and have said so many times. Certainly the jury is out whether a $200 netbook will last very long, and the entry-level full size note-books do seem cheesy and cheap, and may get short shrift when it comes to getting full support from the manufacturer.

So just how low can Apple price an upgraded MacBook, retain the quality and make a decent profit? That is a question the critics won’t answer, but a little logic might come into play. One is that a price cut can often fuel sales that would, in terms of volume and reduced production costs, more than make up for what’s being given up. That’s certainly true when it comes to the MacBook Pro lineup, where few would suggest Apple is suffering.

So a MacBook starting at, say, $799, would seem mighty cheap for a genuine Mac. What Apple would have to do to carve $200 off the retail price is way beyond my pay grade, however. I don’t know what they pay for raw materials, and what sort of standard equipment they’d deem suitable. Certainly the software is a non-issue, since it doesn’t cost them any extra to burn an updated disk image.

On the other hand, it seems a perfectly reasonable price point and if Apple can pack a camcorder, FM radio and pedometer into an iPod nano without raising the price, surely they can build a less-expensive MacBook with pretty much the same standard equipment as the current model. If anything, a $999 version from an anticipated new model would provide a decent jump in standard equipment, such as a speedier processor, additional RAM and a bigger hard drive. Yes, the usual enhancements you might expect.

When it comes to the iMac, the last upgrade put the cheapest 24-inch model at the same price point as the previous 20-inch. Starting at $1,199, the remaining 20-inch iMac isn’t expensive for an all-in-one desktop computer, but you wonder if Apple can’t do better. After all, there have been $999 iMacs in the past, and with desktop computers losing sales right and left across the industry, that should certainly be a target price for an updated design, and $899 doesn’t seem unreasonable.

Indeed, Apple doesn’t really have to change the case or much else, except to take advantage of faster processors and bigger hard drives. The basic equipment is otherwise pretty decent.

Except for one more thing.

There is a segment of the Mac user base and potential Windows switchers — maybe not a large segment, but decently sized I’d venture — that would just love a bit more expandability. This is the core of the occasional request for a Mac minitower that sits between the Mac mini and the Mac Pro in the lineup.

Beyond extra RAM slots, the most likely contender would be the ability to add a second hard drive. I don’t see any problems for Apple in carving out some additional space within the existing form factor. Certainly logic boards and other components are getting smaller all the time.

The super-expandable iMac, should it appear, ought to make it easy for you to crack open at least a portion of the case and, in the tradition of the Mac Pro, add or remove a hard drive with minimal effort. I don’t see this costing a whole lot from the standpoint of raw materials. The basic models would still have a single drive. You could add one via the customize option or just buy one yourself and install it.

When it comes to the graphics chips, the ones in the iMac are plenty good as it is. I see no crying need to provide better graphics beyond the normal upgrades that you might expect from the chip makers themselves.

So there you have it. Notice I haven’t included a revitalized Apple TV or a tablet computer, not that I feel the compelling need to buy either. But I’ll get to them soon.

The spin about whether or not Mac OS X is susceptible to the malware scourge that has inundated the Windows platform will never stop. Whenever Apple releases a security update for Macs or the iPhone, or when a security researcher breaks into a Mac system, lurid headlines will be written.

Recently, for example, there was a story suggesting that Apple missed out on some serious opportunities to harden Snow Leopard and make it less vulnerable to malware. I won’t go into the specifics. I’m not a security expert and don’t play one on TV. But what Apple has done so far demonstrates they are committed to providing a secure computing environment to Mac users. Indeed, some of the suggestions may require tons of back-end work to deliver, and there’s nothing to say that these additional features can’t be rolled in via maintenance updates before the next major Mac OS X release.

One of notable new feature consists of a basic check of file downloads for potential malware. It wasn’t actually an announced feature or refinement for Snow Leopard, but it didn’t take long for the early adopters to discover it as they downloaded various and sundry stuff online.

At best, though, it’s a bare-bones tool. It will use a database to check against and put up a warning notice. It’s up to you to decide whether to trash the file, and it won’t repair any system damage after the fact. Well, at least it’s a start. I realize the companies that market security software are using it as evidence that Apple is beginning to recognize the potential for a malware problem, and maybe it’s a good idea for you to buy one of those products now and get robust protection.

For the time being, The Night Owl disagrees. You see, it’s not as if there’s a known virus threat for Mac OS X users that’s actually spread far and wide. So far, there have been proofs of concept, and a few mild infections. But a lot of what you’ve read about fits into the Trojan Horse category, where you actually have to physically download a file and launch it to allow it to deliver its payload, whatever that might be.

You’d probably categorize that form of malware as a form of social engineering. The same applies to phishing scams, where you get an email purporting to come from your financial institution, and you are asked to login via a link in the message to fix an account problem. If you do make that mistake, you are taken to a site that is cleverly (or not-so-cleverly) designed to mimic the real site. You enter your username and password and the keyloggers on the site record that information, so that the online criminals can login to the real account and steal your money.

Problems of that sort aren’t restricted to any computing platform. A Linux user can become a victim just as well. Yes, all the major browsers offer some measure of anti-phishing protection. The latest edition of the iPhone version of Safari has it too, but they generally work in the same fashion as anti-malware scanners. They check against a database of known scams, or evidence of suspicious behavior. The criminals, alas, are often a step ahead, so by the time updated databases are available, lots of people may have already become victims.

On a more expansive level, it’s quite true that Microsoft has invested a lot of energy and cash to make Windows less susceptible to malware. Certainly it’s a lot harder to infect a properly updated version of Windows XP, or even a Vista PC, and no doubt Windows 7 will be more secure. But you still have to possess an active security software subscription to protect you, since no operating system is perfect.

For now, Internet criminals take advantage of the fact that tens of millions of homes, and even small business PCs, are not well protected. So they have plenty of potential victims from which to create networks of spambots. Even if a PC owner takes the hint and fixes their computer, there are lots more unwary victims waiting their turn.

Yes, some fear merchants want you to believe that the Mac will soon become a major malware target. Just give it time, as Apple’s market share continues to grow, and you’ll see problems that are equal in scope to those facing Windows users.

What they don’t want to tell you is that Mac OS X is just one of a number of Unix and Linux style operating systems, and they have been out there for decades. The first computer virus was actually created on the Unix platform and you don’t see loads of infections on those ubiquitous Linux-based Web servers, do you?

Yes, there are problems of a different sort, such as the occasional DDOS attacks on sites, but such things happen regardless of computing platform. Even networks with special hardware security devices might occasionally succumb to such onslaughts if sufficiently intense.

But when it comes to regular home and business personal computers, the fact remains that Windows users remain highly vulnerable without protection. Mac users are still relatively safe. The latter situation may worsen over time, but few, except those who have a vested interest in selling bad news, believe the situation will ever become serious on the Mac. That’s not what they want to hear, but it appears to be the truth.