So, in no particular order, Steve Jobs returned to the stage thanking the person whose untimely death gave him a second chance at life. Predictably, there was a new iTunes release, version 9, with simpler, smarter navigation, “genius mixes,” and the ability to copy songs among your home computers. While the iPod retains 73.8% of a mature market, Microsoft has a mere 1.1% with their Zune. You wonder why they are wasting shareholder’s money to build an iPod touch clone? Maybe it’s time for a shareholder’s revolt. In other developments, the iPod classic stays in the product line, and storage is restored to 160GB. The new iPod touch starts at $199 with 8GB, with a 32GB version of $299 and a 64GB version at $399. The iPod shuffle receives new colors: black, silver, pink, green and blue, and a stainless steel version is added for $99 with 4GB storage. But instead of delivering a an iPod with a camera, as the rumor sites predicted, Apple pulled a big one out of their hats once again, with a “one more thing” introduction of a camcorder feature for the new iPod nano, available at $149 for the 8GB version; $179 for the 16GB edition. The Flip video’s $149 camcorder only has 4GB of storage, by the way. The new nano also receives an FM radio and a built-in pedometer. Talk about reinvigorating the iPod line! The session closed out with music from Norah Jones. And, no, there was no Beatles-related announcement folks!

A few of the more negative reviews about Snow Leopard make a very basic point, that most of the changes are in the plumbing. Hence you don’t need to worry about upgrading right now, so might as well stick with what you have.

One important reason to feel this way is the fact that you don’t necessarily buy a personal computer to run an operating system, or at least you shouldn’t. Before you suggest that I’m somehow ignoring my oft-repeated concerns about Windows, let me assure you that I’m not. You have to consider your computer as a tool with which to run the applications you need for work or play.

So if the app you need only works under Windows, you aren’t left with much choice, except to find another tool that provides the same functionality, if you can. That in part explains why so many businesses have Windows; they require special vertical market software for which there’s no Mac equivalent.

Sure, you can run Windows on your Mac, as we all know, but you’d also want to use apps from the Mac environment to justify the investment, since Windows is an extra cost item.

But let’s assume you are using a Mac, and now you are confronted with the issue of whether to upgrade to Snow Leopard. Since Mac OS 10.6 doesn’t support the PowerPC, the larger question is whether it’s time to retire that old Mac and buy a new one after just a few years, and that’s a question I can’t answer for you. If you’re running Tiger on an Intel-based model, the price of admission to what many regard as a glorified Service Pack may seem daunting. Is it worth $169? Well, probably not, but consider that the entire bundle also includes the latest iLife and iWork. When you factor in the regular price of those two app suites, Snow Leopard is a mere $11 extra.

Or just buy the regular Snow Leopard upgrade kit at $29, since the installer doesn’t care whether you have Tiger or Leopard. Yes, this is more of a marketing issue from Apple’s standpoint, and they do concede that this alternative works just fine. Under like circumstances, Microsoft would encode a poison pill in the installer that would prevent anyone except the skilled hacker from doing that sort of upgrade.

So it’s clear that Snow Leopard is, in the scheme of things, a pretty casual investment. More so if you bought a new Mac with 10.5 on or after June 8th of this year. Then the Snow Leopard Up-To-Date program, which expires near the end of the year, shaves roughly $20 off the price of admission. How can you miss?

Well, you may want to pass Snow Leopard by if the app or system enhancement you’re using isn’t compatible, and perhaps won’t be for a while. In my situation, I had to use a little trick to fake the Logitech Control Center software (used with my MX Revolution mouse and diNovo Edge Mac keyboard) to install, by launching the installer direct from the package contents. It seems the current 3.0 version is hard-wired not to accept a drive with Snow Leopard as a destination for installation. But all of my other software pretty much just works, so this was not a decision that was difficult to make.

Then there the usual early release bugs. There are glitches in Apple Mail, for example, that may cause problems sending messages under some circumstances. Apple is evidently aware of all this, and there are already rampant rumors that the inevitable 10.6.1 update is coming soon. That may indeed be the time to switch.

Or maybe not.

Granted Snow Leopard is a hair snappier than Leopard in most respects. Granted the little refinements to the Dock, the Finder and other components of Mac OS X are neat and all. But what Snow Leopard offers to most of you is the promise of something far, far better, and it’s a reality that isn’t quite here just yet.

Take the Grand Central Dispatch feature, which will make it far easier for developers to harness the power of the extra processing cores on your Mac. OpenCL will allow chores to be offloaded to the graphics hardware, and 64-bit computing means you can get lots of extra memory and actually have it mean something.

If you are using apps that might really offer greater productivity, you will want to buy the expected Snow Leopard-savvy upgrades, which aren’t apt to be free, when they’re available. That may be the time to get Snow Leopard, but if you are just interested in email, Web browsing, word processing and other tasks that never tax the limits of your Mac’s computing power, where’s the rush!

But if all or most of your key apps are compatible, and you just want a more streamlined, slightly more robust computing environment, Snow Leopard is worth every penny. Besides, what were you really going to spend that $29 for anyway?

It’s very easy to tell a company what you want them to build and what features to include. Apple gets huge numbers of wish lists from you and me — and then goes off and does its own thing anyway.

Actually, despite what some might claim, Apple really and truly does listen to its customers, particularly when it impacts the sales charts. If sales aren’t terribly high, a product might be discontinued, upgraded or, as in the case of Apple TV, regarded as merely a “hobby,” so you don’t expect too much from it. Microsoft, in turn, will just throw more money at the problem without regard to whether the investment will ever pay off.

However, it’s one thing to send Apple feedback about a specific gadget you’d like to see them build, or a feature you want added to the Mac, the iPhone or the iPod. It’s another thing to tell Apple how they should be running heir own business. This is particularly true if you have no experience whatever managing a multinational corporation.

I suppose you can say that Steve Jobs didn’t know how to run a big company either at one time, but he learned from experience, good and especially the bad, and by hiring people who knew what they were doing. But there are some members of the media who seem to feel that they know more about Apple when it comes to running a business, and there’s not an ounce of evidence for that.

This is particularly true for some of those so-called financial analysts that are free and easy with advice, but can’t offer even the tiniest bit of evidence that they have the experience to demonstrate those suggestions will work. Not now, not ever.

Take the oft-repeated demands that Apple needs to find a better way to work with the enterprise. Right now, Apple’s primary initiative has been to sell direct to consumers and educational systems, although they are now offering evaluation licenses for businesses to examine Snow Leopard Server.

The question is, of course, why must things change? Is there something about selling to 10,000 users at once that would be more effective than reaching customers one at a time as it does now? The problem goes back to the fact that far too many of these analysts and media pundits want to rebuild Apple in Microsoft’s image.

We all know that Microsoft earns the lion’s share of its income and profits selling to PC makers and big companies. I’ve already weighed in extensively on the ethics of their business practices, but they are certainly entitled to choose the kinds of customers that most suit them. If anything, Microsoft is trying to be more consumer focused, but their efforts to follow in Apple’s shoes, particularly with the Zune media player, haven’t fared terribly well and I can’t help but remain skeptical as to whether anyone truly cares that there may be a Microsoft Store may be coming to their neighborhood.

It’s a peculiar situation, really. Microsoft has seen declining sales and profits from its present business plan. They want to reach the end user. So in a sense, they are trying to succeed using the opposite approach the analysts and pundits are saying Apple should follow.

Does that make sense to you?

If it’s not working for Microsoft, why do they think Apple should follow that approach? Where’s the evidence that it would make any sense whatever for Apple to suddenly change its business model and go after the enterprise in a way they haven’t up till now.

This doesn’t mean, in fact, that Apple doesn’t care about business customers. It’s just that they go about that initiative in a different way. Consider, for example, how the iPhone is becoming more and more acceptable for business users, not by abandoning its existing customer base or changing things in a way that isn’t acceptable. Instead, Apple has added tools that aren’t visible unless you actually need them, such as Microsoft Exchange Server and VPN access. These and other capabilities were baked into the iPhone because business users needed them to deploy iPhones in their systems.

Snow Leopard also has the Exchange support for a similar reason. Apple isn’t suddenly rushing into the enterprise and exhorting them to buy Macs and iPhones. Their advertising campaigns remain consumer-focused and low-key. At the same time, check the enterprise-oriented publications, such as InfoWorld, and you’ll see greater and greater coverage of using Macs in business. Apple’s approach is in fact working, since they are really penetrating the business market.

Remember, too, that when a corporate executive goes to the IT department and informs them they need to make that executive’s new iPhone or Mac work with their networks, the admins will do what’s necessary to make it happen. At the same time, seeing the growing ease with which Macs integrate with Windows boxes on a corporate installation, they have fewer objections to adding other Macs too.

In the end, Apple’s approach appears to be paying off. They are plucking more and more customers from Microsoft’s user base. But they find it better to handle this conversion one customer at a time. That may not appeal to the analysts and pundits who know nothing about running a company, but you can’t argue with success.

Let’s be totally fair about this folks. Microsoft is notorious for not playing fair with its competitors and potential competitors. It appears the hardball marketers have been so deeply entrenched in managing the company’s affairs for so long that they’ve lost perspective, about what it means to compete fairly in the marketplace.

Sure being a tough competitor is actually a good thing, and if the company happens to have a superior product, that’s even better. But when a company spends too much time living in gray areas where matters of ethics are often forgotten, you have to wonder just how far Microsoft is willing to go in order to win the ballgame.

This is not to say there are no umpires around, which is supposedly the function of the U.S. government’s antitrust people. However, it took years before the complaints against Microsoft for using deceit and illegal actions to beat down Netscape in the early days of the browser wars resulted in an antitrust action. Even then, some feel that the Bush administration was less concerned about competitive extremes than the Clinton administration, and thus they took half a loaf in settlement rather than go all the way.

The rest was evidently left, in part, to the European Union that has ended up forcing Microsoft to pay huge fines for unethical business practices. Indeed, you’d think that Microsoft will, in the future, be forced to play good guy because they have no choice, but that doesn’t mean they can’t skirt around the edges from time to time.

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