Hardly a week passes where I don’t have reason to deal with Microsoft’s disreputable behavior. Just the other day, one of the conservative TV pundits was ranting about a stimulus package provision that allows the folks in the state of Washington to build a bridge that connects two campuses at Microsoft’s main headquarters. You’d think the company could afford to pay the multimillion dollar cost themselves, because with their resources it’s chump change.

But somehow this $11 million earmark got stuck in the bill anyway, no doubt due to Microsoft’s intense lobbying of the appropriate politicians. In any case, some are calling it “Microsoft’s bridge to nowhere,” just where some feel their operating system strategy is going. Well, not financially of course, since I don’t think that anyone will disagree that Windows 7 will probably fare better in the marketplace than Vista.

I say that despite the fact that Vista’s replacement is probably closer to a Service Pack 3 in concept, since most of the changes are designed to make it a leaner, meaner operating system. There is some extra eye candy, of course, the better to entice customers to pay up to hundreds of dollars for a copy. Contrast that with Snow Leopard, which Apple is offering for $29 to those who already have Leopard — and that’s a heavy proportion of the Mac user base.

Believe it or not, a heavy proportion of Windows users, particularly the enterprise, are sticking with Windows XP, circa 2001, because Vista was such a mess. While that probably didn’t hurt MIcrosoft’s bottom line all that much, it wasn’t so good from a PR standpoint.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.

In case you haven’t heard, Apple’s sales are on the rise, and the analysts are scrambling to figure out just what’s going on. Of course, the first theory is that it’s all resulting from the price reductions for most Mac portable computers at the WWDC, but that simply doesn’t wash.

You see, the sales bump actually began in May, ahead of the WWDC, when pretty much everyone didn’t expect any changes in the note-book lineup. Of course, if you factor in a free iPod touch, I suppose you can consider that a price cut too, but that’s the sort of promotion Apple has been running in previous years. It’s not something concocted at the last minute to stop hemorrhaging sales, although I’m sure the naysayers would prefer to think of it that way.

When it comes to the slightly-refreshed and cheaper MacBook Pro line, the changes mostly make sense. FireWire is restored on the 13 inch model, and the SD card slot seems a sensible alternative, unless you prefer ExpressCard/34. It just seems that Apple is never destined to get the ports precisely the way you want them. Forgetting the issue of price, frankly I think Apple should be working harder to pile them in as much as possible. A few more or less shouldn’t seriously impact production costs, and consider how this minimalist approach actually harms Mac users.

When it comes to the MacBook Air, the woeful lack of ports really doesn’t matter to me. I’m not in the market for one today, tomorrow or next year. I considered getting my son, Grayson, one for his May 2008 graduation, but he preferred the additional features on the black MacBook, which has traveled with him to nine countries so far without serious scuffing to the case.

But I will go against the grain and suggest the price cuts didn’t come suddenly out of the blue, and it may well be that the note-book update was pushed ahead a few months to further boost sales. That makes perfect sense, and it doesn’t necessarily smack of desperation. Apple has been far more aggressive in pricing than some would have you believe. Think about that the next time you see a $99 iPhone 3G at your neighborhood AT&T factory store.

Now I’m sure most of you will be watching Apple’s quarterly financials closely when the numbers are released later this month. The betting is that iPod sales are down. It would be truly amazing if they continued to increase, though you shouldn’t ignore the impact of the iPod touch. But if they dip, don’t be surprised to see some price reductions there. At the very least, the iPod touch will get larger flash drives, in proportion to the level of increase on the iPhone 3GS. In other words, twice as much.

The next Mac update will likely be the iMac, probably in October. The last product refresh, in March, resulted in essentially moving the line down a price notch. Where Apple might go from there is anyone’s guess. Whether the iMac will get a case redesign is questionable, though. No doubt there will speedier chips and all and larger hard drives, but I just wonder if Apple couldn’t fill another need, and that’s expandability. Just adding space for a second hard drive would perhaps address the concerns of some business users who can’t see spending extra for a Mac Pro.

My cloudy crystal ball can’t see where Apple might take the Mac mini. The recent changes didn’t involve a whole lot of R&D. It was all speed bump, and I wonder if that model is finally getting its due, or is still an unheralded hero in the personal computer space.

Apple sure likes the design, since they slimmed it down for the Apple TV, AirPort Express and Time Capsule. But I wonder what might happen if Apple decided to combine the Apple TV with the Mac mini and somehow make the latter more of a media center type of product. But there’s not a whole lot of evidence that such things really have much market potential, even though Microsoft still offers that capability in the most expensive versions of Windows.

But remember that few outside of Apple can truly comprehend what they’re really up to. Yes, most of the recent innovations have merely been clever slants on existing products. The iPod made the digital music player an icon, and the iPhone is on its way to doing the same thing with smartphones. Yes, you do read about iPhone killer products every few months, but when the new, highly touted Palm Pre sold a fraction of what the iPhone 3GS sold during its debut weekend, it’s quite clear that the word “killer” might be focused on the wrong product.

What’s more, while I once thought Apple was certain to make a grown-up iPhone or perhaps morph it into a sort of tablet computer, I’m less certain of that now. But I’m fully prepared for plenty of surprises from Apple in the months to come. Maybe Steve Jobs will even host the next press event for a change.

I notice that Microsoft has yet to change its TV “Laptop Hunter” ads since Apple cut the price of Mac note-books. Not only were those spots misleading before, but they now contain downright lies. Windows fanboys (or fanpersons), of course, might prefer to claim it’s the spirit and not the substance that’s important.

For a while, some felt that perhaps Apple was indeed being impacted by that renewed campaign against the Mac and the perilous state of the economy. According to recent NPD Group surveys, Mac shipments in the U.S. did decline somewhat through the first and second quarters of 2009. There was, however, a short-term jump in March, when the desktop line was refreshed, and a larger one beginning in May that more or less coincided with Apple’s annual back-to-school promotion. The trend continues since June’s Mac note-book price reductions.

According to analyst Katy Huberty of Morgan Stanley, “Apple began to outperform the broader commercial PC segment — with commercial Mac shipments up 25% month-over-month in May versus market growth of just 1%.” As AppleInsider notes in its story about her report, Huberty is notorious for underestimating Apple’s sales. Fascinating indeed, because it seems to indicate that even the skeptics are impressed.

I realize some might still suggest that Apple’s sales would be better without the counterarguments from Microsoft, but I’d rather be charitable and suggest that those ad campaigns have had no impact whatever. They’re just fodder for the Fast Forward button on your cable or satellite DVR. Or maybe some felt so disgusted, they went out and bought Macs to express their negative opinions of Microsoft.

If the trend continues, Apple’s summer season will be surprisingly robust, and it augers well for the fall when Apple will likely introduce a new line of iPods and those expected revisions to the iMac and perhaps the Mac mini. At the very least, don’t be surprised if there’s a price cut for the desktop Macs too, although I am not one to predict Apple’s behavior on pricing and other market-based decisions.

Sure, some might claim that Apple was forced to cut prices because of the economy and the renewed interest in the PC, but I see little evidence of that. Apple has traditionally delivered better products for the same price when updating a particular model, which can be interpreted by some as a price cut. Take the iMac, where the basic 20-inch model these days costs $300 less than the equivalent in the previous lineup. While the entry-level price points didn’t change, what you got did.

Also remember that all this success is coming without any indication Apple is prepared to jump into the netbook segment, despite the insistence by media and financial analysts that they’re missing out on a load of potential sales. As Apple has stated over and over again, the best you can say about a netbook is that it’s small and cheap. The keyboard is cramped, the trackpad may be inconvenient, and the general user experience is just not very pleasant. But if you’re on a budget and are willing to put up with some level of discomfort to handle some basic computing chores, a netbook might still make sense.

Sure, I suppose you can even consider the iPhone a sort of netbook after a fashion, although it is generally regarded as a smartphone. So you don’t expect a keyboard scheme that allows for burst typing, although it is quite suitable for short messages and easy navigation among the tons of features the iPhone offers. I wouldn’t even dismiss the possibility that Apple might still be considering a grown-up version with the same operating system, but sporting a larger screen, and perhaps a physical keyboard, or at least a way to hook up one by cable or Bluetooth.

For that to happen, however, Apple will have to be sure that they can sell enough of them to make the investment worthwhile. As soon as they bump the size considerably, the issue of easy transport goes out the window. The iPhone is small enough to carry in a conventional-sized pocket or purse or attached via a clip to your belt. It’s not too small to lose, which you can’t say about the iPod shuffle nowadays.

As soon as you expand the iPhone to the size of perhaps the fabled Apple eMate 300 of the 1990s, you need a carrying case of some sort. It may be less of a weight on your shoulders than a traditional portable computer, but is that interim size going to catch a breeze and generate sufficiently large sales? Understand that Apple isn’t the sort of company to just enter a market segment without careful research and a certainty that it’ll be profitable. They pick and choose their products carefully. As a result, their failures are few.

Indeed, Apple TV may even gain some traction some day, as soon as Apple figures out how to make it pay off.

I find it interesting that so few of you are complaining because Snow Leopard pretty much signals the end of the PowerPC. Maybe that’s not a bad thing, because that venerable processor family seldom realized its full potential, particularly in the latter days.

Take the G4. Do you recall when Steve Jobs boasted that you’d have a “supercomputer on your desktop”? The original version was supposed to sport 400MHz, but got downgraded to 350MHz because of production issues with the faster chips. The G5 was supposed to hit the magic 3GHz barrier a year after its release, but that day came and went with only modest speed boosts. The hoped for PowerBook G5 was a dream, unless you craved something that would double as a broiler.

But even in 1994, when the PowerPC was first launched, it took a while to realize its promised speed improvements. For one thing, most of the Mac OS was still coded for 68K Macs, and thus had to operate in emulation. The same held true for many of your favorite apps, so for a year or two it all seemed like a step backwards.

The transition to Intel took a whole lot faster with fewer teething pains. Apple made it easier for developers to code their products as Universal, which would allow them to operate in both PowerPC and Intel format. Of course, not everything was super smooth. The upgraded apps still had to be optimized for both processor families, and it did seem as if the Intel version got better treatment. An example would be Office 2008, which is widely regarded as performing less efficiently on the PowerPC than its predecessor. Let’s not forget some of Adobe’s Creative Suite software that was designed to be Intel only.

You could see the handwriting on the wall.

Now, some three and a half years after the first Intel-based Mac appeared, Apple is on the verge of releasing the first version of Mac OS X designed solely for that platform. However, PowerPC users of Leopard shouldn’t feel completely abandoned, as it does appear Apple will release necessary updates for a while yet, particularly security fixes. But the prospects for more updates to Tiger are slim to none.

Sporting over 100 “refinements,” Snow Leopard does appear to be a sensible upgrade, particularly when you factor in the $29 upgrade fee. Apple isn’t adding new capabilities strictly to play the numbers game as they seem to have done with previous system upgrades. Most of the changes seem to make sense, even the Put Back command that lets you return an item from the Trash to its former location without playing the guessing game. Or putting your brain cells to the task when you have better uses for them.

I expect the business community will appreciate the enhanced native support for Microsoft Exchange software, but I wonder whether this means that Microsoft will now have less incentive to upgrade Entourage, since Apple is providing much of its functionality. Besides, Entourage, despite its excellent handling of IMAP email, can be a temperamental beast in some respects, as most of you no doubt realize.

In any case, having fewer visible changes might make for a more stable initial 10.6 release. As many of you recall, Apple is notorious for having to rush out maintenance updates to recent versions of Mac OS X to serious address bugs that appeared early on. While there’s no guarantee of anything, I do wonder if that’s the result of marketing making too much of a push to get the thing out as quickly as possible, figuring the rest of the stuff would be fixed later on.

Since Snow Leopard is supposed to be the ultimate clean up release, though, that puts the onus on Apple’s development team to clear out the sludge and deliver a more reliable release this time. Since we don’t have the actual date when it’ll show up on the retail shelves, other than an amorphous September timeframe, you’d think there’s sufficient wiggle room to delay the release a few weeks should problems arise.

Certainly I could selfishly hope Snow Leopard will have its coming out party on Wednesday, September 9th, my birthday, but I sort of suspect it’ll arrive later in the month. Prior to the WWDC, I was thinking in terms of the last Friday of August. My new projected release date is Friday, September 25th.

That choice would give Apple its usual weekend window for initial sales, and also plenty of time to meet its promised release date and yet allow what you hope would be sufficient time to address critical defects before millions of Mac users install 10.6.

The other consideration is where Apple should go from here. I have not seen much in the way of 10.7 wish lists yet. I would presume, based on Apple’s current release schedule, that it probably won’t debut until the first part of 2011 at the earliest. That’s plenty of time to hope for that marble theme, if anyone cares, or some really substantial improvements.