Some media pundits biggest difference between Apple and Microsoft is the fact that the former is engineering-oriented and the latter is sales-oriented. But such black and white distinctions don’t really apply. How could they? After all, one of the reasons Apple has gotten where it is today is brilliant marketing, but they also have products that, in large part, fulfill the claims made for them.

To get a sense of where Microsoft is, go ahead and do a Google — or even a Bing! — search for benchmarks comparing all the major browsers on the Windows platform. Check the rendering accuracy and performance ratings for Internet Explorer 8, and compare it to Safari 4, Firefox 3.5, the latest Google Chrome app, and, of course, Opera 10.

Be fair now. Look at the reviews from different sources so you’re absolutely certain you have a fair picture of how well they do. Now it’ll be revealed to everyone, and that’s Microsoft’s total inability to have a best-of-breed product!

Indeed, Internet Explorer is, in nearly every case, dead last in terms of the ability to render pages accurately and rapidly. Yet it’s still the number one browser on the planet, and clearly not because of its quality.

Of course, it’s also true that Microsoft dominates the operating system wars, and Internet Explorer is preloaded on Windows PCs. That doesn’t mean PC makers don’t offer alternatives, and in response to an edict from the European Union, folks on that continent will likely have a choice of which default browser they want to install when they set up a new Windows box.

However, Internet Explorer isn’t the only instance where Microsoft builds an inferior product.

Certainly, just about every fair reviewer these days will rate Mac OS X as superior in almost every respect, although you have more options to configure Windows. However, too much of a good thing usually causes endless confusion if you’re not a Windows power user. Few are suggesting that Windows — any version — is more reliable that the Mac OS of any particular era, although the stuff that Apple produced in the mid-1990s was, at the time, correctly described as basically sucking less.

When it comes to digital music players, Microsoft got tired of sitting on the sidelines and watching its PlaysForSure partners lose the ballgame, so they tried to ape Apple and deliver an integrated product, the Zune. However, they again came up with an imitation of the real thing. Not just that, but they tried to ape the real thing of a year or two earlier. It seems as if Microsoft is perennially behind the curve on most of what they produce.

Now it’s fair to say that Microsoft has almost always been that way. The original MS-DOS operating system was something Bill Gates and crew bought from another company, renamed, and licensed to IBM. Yes, when it comes to changing names, Microsoft must be good at it, since they do it so often.

In the early 1980s, few computer experts were suggesting that MS-DOS was far and away superior  to all the rest of the text-based operating systems of the time. I won’t even get into the known similarities between Microsoft’s system and the competition. That was long ago and far away, but this sort of thing has been part and parcel of the company’s DNA since the beginning.

Yes, Microsoft will acquire intellectual property, and they’ll attempt to imitate what’s already available from other companies. They’ll also promise to do better, but seldom manage to get anything more than a pale imitation of the product out the door.

This doesn’t mean that all Microsoft products are necessarily bad. The early reviews indicate, for example, that Windows 7 is way better than its predecessor, the failed Windows Vista. Performance and reliability are evidently improved significantly, and it’s evidently quite a usable system.

But it all comes down to this: Microsoft has never, ever, hit the top of the heap as the result of fair competition, and by delivering a best of breed product. With some 90,000 employees and billions of dollars in spare cash in the bank, you’d think they certainly have the resources to do better. I’m quite sure, in fact, that many of Microsoft’s employees are as smart and innovative as the ones at Apple, but they don’t excel at their tasks because of poor leadership in the executive suites.

This appears to be one of the unfortunate side effects of taking a technology company and making it top-heavy with salespeople. Sure, they know how to sell product, but that doesn’t guarantee excellence.

But it’s not just Microsoft that has suffered from a lack of true innovation because they had the wrong team at the top. Remember the problems Apple encountered when they made a former soft drink executive CEO, and it took them years to live that down, before it nearly destroyed the company.

In Microsoft’s case, few will suggest that they’re going out of business in the foreseeable future. But unless they change their ways soon, there will be a long slow decline. Consider the biggest tech companies of the 1980s, for example. How many of them are still around? I’m just asking.

I have to admit that I was not surprised but rather pleased that Apple scheduled their special press event for September 9th. But it has nothing to do with the agenda, or the impact of the new products. Instead, it’s the simple fact that I was born on September 9th, and, no, I won’t mention the year.

But I’d be foolish to assume that this is anything more than the luck of the draw. That date is simply highly appropriate for Apple’s marketing plans, and the agenda is, on the surface, fairly obvious. The musical artwork on Apple’s invitation makes it quite clear that we’ll be seeing new iPods, no doubt with more memory and perhaps some new features. There are even suggestions that cameras may appear on some models, notably the iPod touch and the iPod nano.

Consider that the iPod is a mature market, and the main reason that sales are not dropping by larger margins may well be that teens have embraced the touch and all those great apps. It’s also true that millions of other potential customers have already moved to the iPhone or plan to shortly — and that may indeed be the best iPod of all.

One huge question mark is the fate of the Classic lineup. My son got the last 160GB model; it’s now down to 120GB and you have to wonder when Flash memory will be cheap enough to offer an affordable alternative with a similar capacity. However it’s not as simple as that. Most iPod and iPhone users can comfortably fit their media libraries within a 32GB space. For those who can’t, neither 120GB or even 160GB may be sufficient.

My feeling is that Apple is likely proceeding with the assumption that the iPod will be the repository for most but not all music and video libraries. This means that iTunes will be used to funnel files between these devices as needed. This will particularly become important when more and more people acquire HD movies.

As for iTunes, there are rampant rumors of a version 9, one that’ll supposedly offer better integration with social networks. Somehow, however, Blu-ray is entering the picture. Apple doesn’t build Macs with the Blu-ray option — at least not yet. However, Blu-ray has become one of the retail heroes during the current economic crisis. Millions this summer chose “stay-cations,” which is taking a vacation but staying home, rather than spend money on long trips. Instead, they are buying HD televisions in droves, and more and more Blu-ray players to play back those gorgeous high definition DVDs.

As Blu-ray decks hit the $100 price point, and you can get closeouts at that level now on occasion, sales will soar way beyond expectations. Thus it will make more and more sense for Apple to seriously consider updating their optical drives accordingly. It doesn’t even require new models; just additional options if you choose to customize a new Mac. If lots of people buy Blu-ray, Apple could easily make it standard issue on the higher-end models.

There are also reports that Apple is closing down the production lines for the Apple TV, perhaps in anticipation of a model refresh. If this is true, the question would be whether it’ll just be a modest upgrade, with a faster processor, more memory and more storage, or whether there will be a huge change in the software. Will there be a full-fledged DVR, TiVO-style support? Is Apple finally going to come up with a way to make this “hobby” pay off?

Or are the current rumblings from the Mac rumor sites that no such product is immediately forthcoming more correct?

The other speculation can best be summed up with the phrase “Fab Four.” The Beatles are essentially the last major holdouts of the digital music revolution. Digitally remastered and remixed versions of their song catalog, one that’s decades old, are going to be released on September 9th. So wouldn’t it make sense to also offer them on iTunes at the same time?

Is there any hint in Apple’s announcement about The Beatles? Actually there is, in sort of a perverse way. In the glory days, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were regarded as rivals. Apple’s invitation quotes a phrase from a Rolling Stones song lyric, and perhaps Apple was just poking fun at the prospects of adding The Beatles to iTunes.

So the “one more thing” event may well be that announcement, perhaps with appearances, in person or via satellite, of Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. But spare us Yoko Ono, please.

The real question for me is whether I’d be willing to buy all those albums again. My current collection pretty much dates back to the 1980s, when they first came to CD. I suppose if the digital engineers were able to recapture more of the original audio, perhaps the answer would be yes, and that may be what the surviving Beatles and the music industry are counting on.

There is one more piece of rampant speculation about Apple’s media event, and that’s whether Steve Jobs will host the session or at least put in a cameo appearance to prove that he has recovered nicely from his recent liver transplant. As much as I hope that he’s OK, is his presence really essential? Probably not.

Unlike just about any recent Apple OS release, the amount of published misinformation about Snow Leopard is nothing short of staggering. Why should this be so?

Well, I could look at the meta issue and bemoan the poor quality of our educational system, or the fact that the media is largely controlled by huge conglomerates that only care about profit margins. Journalism takes a back seat far too often.

Or it may just be that Apple’s core message about what Snow Leopard is — and what it is not — has been misunderstood, or only partially understood.

In recent days, for example, I read about some of the reasons why Snow Leopard takes up less storage space on your hard drive. Maybe it’s the fact that all the PowerPC code has been stripped from the system, and perhaps there are fewer printer drivers installed during the initial setup process. Sure, that’s part of the picture, but if these alleged tech pundits spent a few minutes doing some online research, they’d also realize that most of the system files are also compressed. So it’s a combination of reasons.

Another major source of confusion is 64-bit computing. Since regular Macs boot with the 32-bit kernel, what happened to the promise of 64-bit? Well, if kernels were the sum total of the things that are run on your Mac, I suppose that would present a problem, but they’re not. The 32-bit default setting — easily changed by pressing the numbers six and four (64) during restart — is an important safety measure, taking into account that many third-party drivers, for printers, scanners, input devices and so on and so forth, are not yet 64-bit aware. Supposedly a simple recompile would deal with these shortcomings in most cases. Regardless, it doesn’t prevent applications from exacting the key benefits of 64-bit computing.

Right now, the Xserve boots into 64-bit  mode by default. That will spread to the rest of the lineup eventually, but it’s not something that should present any source of concern.

The other foolish claim is that Snow Leopard is a failure because Apple wasn’t able to add another 200 or 300 new features. Some Mac users are among the folks who have come to this erroneous conclusion, because they weren’t paying attention to what Apple has been saying all along. Back at the 2008 WWDC, when Snow Leopard was first announced, Apple said there’d be zero new features, and then said, well, there’d be one and that’s support for Microsoft Exchange.

The purpose of Snow Leopard was largely to provide developers with several powerful tools that, in the end, would allow your Mac to run a whole lot faster. Those extra processing cores would be unleashed to share a larger portion of the workload, and some of it could also be offloaded to the graphics processor as well.

However, you don’t see a visible difference when such tools are employed, except that longer rendering tasks take less time to complete. As more and more applications are recompiled to take advantage of the added tools, you’ll see greater and greater performance gains.

Of course none of this should represent a secret. Apple has been very public about its plans from Day One.

This doesn’t mean that there’s nothing new about Snow Leopard. There are over 100 “refinements,” meaning that things were changed to make them function better. In the past, some of them might have merited a new feature label, but not now. Again, all of this was explained in extremely deep detail on Apple’s site, particularly after the WWDC last June, and it was echoed ad infinitum on lots of tech sites since then.

And, despite one unfortunate claim, the absence of Steve Jobs for his recent liver transplant didn’t suddenly cause Apple to scale back their plans for Snow Leopard.

To drive home the point that it wasn’t intended to be a feature-laden release, they cut $100 off the retail purchase price. Can anything be less confusing?

As with most new software releases, there are also some bugs, many of which may actually be due to the all-too-common conflicts with third-party software. In a few months, all this shall pass. No doubt Apple will have one or two 10.6.x releases out to take care of their part of the problem.

No, such issues aren’t necessarily the result of poor development practices and improper or incomplete beta testing. In the real world, this is how commercial software is produced, and Apple does better than many companies.

Another comparison is with Windows 7. Even though they quietly admit otherwise, Microsoft would prefer that you believe their next system release represents a major upgrade, and that’s not so. They have cleaned up the plumbing to be sure, and added some interface refinements. But, in exchange for exacting many times the purchase price of Snow Leopard, Windows 7 paves little new ground from a developer’s standpoint. None of the improvements match the scope of what Apple has devised for Snow Leopard, such as Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL.

And Microsoft isn’t doing a thing to eradicate that miserable Registry, a relic of the past that has caused tons of grief for Windows users for many, many years. But what do you expect from a company that values sales skills above engineering expertise in its senior management?

After writing this week’s newsletter, I got to wondering whether some people have led themselves to expect too much from Snow Leopard. After all, Apple has managed to push from 200 to 300 new features for every single release, but this time they claimed to be taking a step back to fix the plumbing.

Yes, if you look at the changes, there are in fact over 100 “refinements.” I put that term in quotes, primarily because some of those changes would have been regarded as new features in the old days. Regardless, I can’t see that Apple has over-promised and under-delivered here. They said it would be a fixer-upper and to drive home the point they’re offering it for $29. That’s chump change when it comes to an OS release.

Sure, Microsoft has cut the price some for Windows 7, but it is still way more expensive. For a brief period of time, you could even get it free, and you can still download beta versions from Microsoft, which are essentially Golden Master releases, or something approaching that level.

Now if you ask Microsoft, in a rare honest day they’ll admit they took the fundamentals of their failed Vista operating system, fixed many of its shortcomings and performance bottlenecks, then added some eye candy. That and a new name were sufficient to make Windows fandom, what there’s left of it, believe it was something new and different. Right, sure, and if any reviewer attempts to convey that impression, ignore them outright. They’re either sadly misinformed or deluded, or they just want to lie to you.

This is particularly troublesome when it comes to the so-called comparisons between the two. On the one hand, there’s the actual Snow Leopard release that’s being sold at an Apple authorized reseller near you. I suppose the conspiracy-minded among you might wonder if the so-called GM earlier this month was the same thing. I’m inclined to say yes, simply because there was very little time from committing to shipping to actually getting the tiny upgrade kits into the stores.

On the other hand, there are those millions of copies of the alleged RTM (Release To Manufacturing) version of Windows 7 that are in the hands of PC users around the world. This is the one they are using to write those reviews.

Now if you take Microsoft at its word — which is not always a good idea — the RTM build is it. It’s the one that will be preloaded onto new PCs soon, and made available through regular retail channels. But how do you really know that it’s the real thing and not something that is still being altered by Microsoft’s programmers? Do they really have to change the build number to avoid the Build Police from raiding them? Really now!

In any case, you just know that both Snow Leopard and Windows 7 will log a reasonable number of bug reports. That’s part and parcel for any point-zero release. In Apple’s favor, you’ll probably see a 10.6.1 within weeks, whereas it could take over a year for a Windows 7 Service Pack to appear. Sure, there will be updates in the interim, but tracking them is best left to IT people. They are seldom labeled in any way that makes sense to regular people.

With Windows 7, however, aside from any initial shipping bugs and appropriate remedies, the performance factor at the beginning will likely be pretty close to what you’ll get until its successor appears. Sure, hardware will get faster, but that’s not the point.

With Snow Leopard, it’s the beginning of a long journey. No doubt some of the early contradictions in performance testing are indicative that there will be a period of optimizing that may take months or years to reach fruition. Sure, Grand Central Dispatch will make it easier for developers to update their apps to support Intel’s powerful multicore processors. But the products that will benefit most, such as Adobe’s Creative Suite, are months away. Then again, I suppose Adobe could release a Photoshop plugin to speed up some functions. They did that long ago during the early days of the PowerPC.

Snow Leopard’s graphics performance may also be an issue at the starting gate, and this is where a number of the most serious performance bottlenecks are to be found. OpenCL will allow developers to harness the often idle power of graphics chips to further enhance processing speeds. But graphics drivers will have to be optimized first, and that probably explains some of the disparities in early performance testing. Down the line, apps will also have to be recompiled to support OpenCL. Things of that sort don’t happen overnight.

So if you want to know how Snow Leopard really performs, consider the early reports to be primarily a starting point. Ask again in six months.