The other day, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, a former presidential candidate and now a TV host, said that he ended 22 years of Windows frustration by moving to the Mac. You have to wonder why it took him so long to liberate himself from Microsoft’s PC hell.

Now I’m not going to spend the rest of this column criticizing Huckabee for his belated epiphany that he was using the wrong personal computer. There are still hundreds of millions of PC users who, for various reasons, are still stuck in the Microsoft camp. I even suppose some of them like it.

No, folks, I do not regard Windows as the McDonalds of the personal computing world. You see, for the most part, people who dine at McDonalds actually like the food and the service. Indeed, I read the other day that the chain is actually ordering more chicken than hamburgers these days, so maybe there is hope that they are also trying to influence, in a modest fashion no doubt, healthier diets.

With Windows, I really don’t know a single person who says they like the experience, except, perhaps, for the few power users who enjoy building their own custom PC boxes, and endlessly configuring and reconfiguring the operating system to meet their needs. If that’s your bag, I suppose Windows is all right, but then again, if your know your Unix, Mac OS X’s command line utility, Terminal, can perform lots of under-the-hood magic on your system.

These days, Apple touts the fact that half of the people buying Macs at their retail stores are new to the platform. Many of those are clearly switchers, while some are no doubt buying their very first personal computer. While I have always had some concerns over how they arrive at these figures, I suppose the registration process is part of the answer, since they are considering people who have not previously registered a new Mac purchase. I’m not aware that there are point-of-sale surveys — does anyone have any such experience at an Apple Store?

Assuming the numbers are accurate, and that Apple will continue to demonstrate sales figures way ahead of the PC industry as a whole, is there anything they can do to speed up the abandonment of Windows?

Of course it’s also true that Microsoft seems to be working hard at hastening the process, although they’re not aware of it. Their new product presentations seem to be more of the same, pretending that they can still continue as they are now, without fixing the moribund corporate engine.

Take Windows 7. A public beta was announced during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week by CEO Steve Ballmer. Whether due to high demand or just the usual Microsoft incompetence, many who attempted to download the file encountered what the company describes as a “less than ideal” experience.

I could, I suppose, just cut Microsoft some slack. Even Apple has had problems with their servers from time to time, particularly the MobileMe debacle.

As far as Windows 7 is concerned, Microsoft is clearly working hard, as usual, to make it seem more Mac-like, particularly with their imitation of the Dock in place of the venerable taskbar. At least they go to the right place for inspiration, but does that mean the new version of Windows will address all or most of the ills of its predecessor?

Microsoft claims Window 7 will be leaner, faster and more compatible with third-party peripherals. The bloated Vista has been a non-starter, and many business customers, where the major part of the Windows monopoly lies, have decided to sit this one out, hoping the replacement will be better.

But when you look at Windows 7, you wonder if they were reading some of Apple’s playbook for Snow Leopard. Leaner, faster? All right, but will Microsoft also exact the same exorbitant price for the upgrade? Will they give frustrated Vista users a break, or provide some special financial incentive for XP holdouts to come along for the ride?

At the same time, some suggest that Apple ought to make a bigger push into the enterprise. Clearly they are taking baby steps, although adding Exchange support for the iPhone and, for Mac OS X, when Snow Leopard comes, will help things move along somewhat more rapidly.

The real question is whether Apple is willing to meet the requirements of specific businesses, such as having custom models that might not be available through normal consumer channels. Such products might simply be note-books that skip the built-in Web cams and bundled iLife. But there are certainly reasons for a company to want to have video conferences involving people inside the company and with clients. Would a company be threatened with the belief that employees might use iLife to edit home videos and manage photo libraries on company time? What does it cost anyway for Apple to image a hard drive with an altered configuration?

Certainly Apple isn’t listening to the financial and media analysts who keep demanding that they cut their prices and sacrifice profits to get higher volume.

In the end, though, it may just be that, as more and more people switch to the Mac, their family, friends and business associates will learn by their example and turn a trickle into a flood.

Even though I’m not really a fan of Mike Huckabee, I do wonder if many of the people who heard his on-air admission that he’s now a Mac user were somehow influenced by his example to do the very same thing.

Once upon a time, you had two fundamental classes of journalists. One group worked for regular newspapers or broadcast facilities, plying their trade; the others were employed by the supermarket tabloids, offering up gossip, real and otherwise, about various and sundry celebrities, political figures and notables from the business world.

While there are gray areas, in which some media outlets cross both lines with equal fervor, that constitutes the way most have characterized the press, at least until recent years.

These days, it is often difficult to know where responsible journalism ends and tabloid coverage begins. Even formerly respected publishers have decided that profits are more important than a respect for the facts.

Certainly the life and times of Steve Jobs would seem to be fodder for such coverage, which is, unfortunate, considering that he is also CEO of a huge multinational corporation with roughly $30 billion in annual sales and over 30,000 employees.

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

I think many of the people went to San Francisco to listen to Philip Schiller’s keynote at the Macworld Expo expected him to say something in observance of the fact that the Mac’s 25th anniversary is coming later this month. Who can forget, for example, that famous 1984 commercial, directed by none other than Ridley Scott, which introduced the “computer for the rest of us” to the masses?

Well, it appears Apple might have forgotten. If you listen over and over again to that tepid keynote — and I don’t know why you would — you will find the word Mac repeated frequently, but not its forthcoming anniversary. You would think that Schiller could have spent five or ten minutes highlighting the history of the platform, perhaps starting with that famous TV ad and going through the major products that were introduced over the years.

Yes you’d think that would make perfect sense, but not to Apple.

True, there might be some sort of special media event — or perhaps a lineup of special 25th anniversary products — being readied for later this month. Maybe we’ll hear about it a few days before it happens, which usually prevents out-of-town journalists from taking advantage of the lower-cost flights to the Silicon Valley. But I am not at all optimistic about such a thing.

As with the 20th anniversary, it appears that Apple isn’t very interested in letting us know how they got from there to here; there’s no sense of history whatever. And, no, it’s not true that all of Apple’s leadership arrived with Steve Jobs after his other computing company, NeXT, was purchased. Sure, there are plenty of conspiracy theories about how the NeXT people staged a palace coup, threw out everything in their stead, and let their own ideas and products prevail.

Yes I know that some of you feel that, in transitioning the original NeXT operating system to Mac OS X, Apple ignored certain key features of the Classic Mac OS, and threw them by the wayside. They may have had their reasons, but it may not have been the result of politics. The development team’s leadership might have honestly believed they had better ideas, and in many respects, they were right on.

Lest we forget, Philip Schiller’s entire tenure at Apple numbers 17 years, so he has served under different CEOs. Product design genius Jonathan Ive was also present at Apple before Jobs returned, although perhaps his vast talents went unrecognized at the time.

So I really don’t pretend to know why Apple seems to want to forget the past, or allude to it only in a passing fashion.

It’s also true, I suppose, that Apple, under Steve Jobs, isn’t averse to tossing out whole products and features wholesale. I suppose that made an awful lot of sense when he took over the company he co-founded, and had to deal with lots of red ink and poorly-implemented designs and marketing plans. Most any product segment that didn’t tie-in entirely to the Mac platform was discarded, and the overwrought model designations were vastly simplified. Maybe simplified too much, as I’ve said previously, but everything was focused on a small number of distinct choices in the desktop and note-book categories.

But none of that would have happened had the original Mac designers not paved the way in the early 1980s, when they created the first all-in-one Macintosh. Although there had been efforts to develop graphical user interfaces before the Mac debuted, most failed in the marketplace. When it comes to commercial operating systems, it was all Apple or Microsoft. Yes, Linux and other Unix distributions have their own graphical “shells” that attempt to put pretty faces on everything, but they remain the province of power users who love to tweak and tinker with open source software.

When you compare Apple to other long-time product lines, you can see where they have confounded the experts. They’ve been counted out time and time again, only to rise from the ashes and return bigger than ever. That is a great story in and of itself.

Indeed, how many products survive near as long? VHS took over the videotape market in the 1980s. Try to find one today, except on eBay, or in a cheap deck integrated with a DVD player or recorder. When you go to a music store, everything is on a CD, or a music DVD. Cassettes are gone, and only the demands of a small band of hard-core fanatics keep a limited set of vinyl recordings in production.

I could go on and on. DVDs will fade completely in a few years, replaced partly by Blu-ray, but probably in large part by movie downloads. CDs will join them too in the dustbin of dead media formats. After all, the largest music retailer on the planet, Apple iTunes, is all-digital, right?

Now, as I said, perhaps Apple’s marketing people decided to keep their Macworld Expo participation low-key, since it’s their last. Maybe there will be some observance of the Mac’s 25th anniversary. But if Apple thinks it’s not important, they are making a huge mistake.