So I was reading the latest issue of Time magazine, when I spied a flashy, somewhat cartoonish ad telling me that “You Need the Speed of Norton 2009.”

Do I?

Well, when I went to Symantec’s Web site to see just what this spectacular product was supposed to do, I found a link to the advertised free trial copy, but had to navigate through another screen or two before there was any information that this was strictly a Windows product.

Now this is not to say that Symantec doesn’t publish Mac security software. They actually have four Mac products available that, in combination, provide many of the features of their Windows applications. They have a long history building Mac products, and their they typically get pretty decent reviews. But, typical of a number of software developers, they do not distinguish the Mac from the Windows lineups in their ads.

Indeed, I can see where many Mac users might download that free trial software and never realize they were getting something they couldn’t use. Well, not unless Boot Camp or an operating system virtual machine, such as Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion, were available with recent Windows versions.

Now Symantec is not alone in being late to the party when it comes to fully comprehending the extent of the Mac’s resurgence. With reports that Macs took some 20% of the U.S. retail market last month, you can bet that any software company that supports Apple stands the chance of competing for a rapidly-growing market. This is particularly important at a time where PC sales, all told, are considered relatively flat.

Of course, when it comes to security software, the larger question is whether you need it at all, and the answer is probably still no, so long as you show some caution in the way you use your Mac. Although there have been some minor virus outbreaks and proofs of concept for Mac OS X, there hasn’t been a widespread infection on the Mac in a number of years, dating back to Mac OS 9.

True, some tech pundits tout that danger’s inevitability with lurid prose. It will come any day now, and soon Mac users won’t be able to boast that they are using a safer platform. Well, Mac OS X arrived in the spring of 2001 as a mainstream release (a public beta came out the previous fall). Now that we’re into the final part of 2008, that which was supposed to be inevitable seems to have been postponed yet again.

So what do I mean by caution?

Well, Apple just added phishing protection to Safari, and I recommend that all of you who use this browser get the upgrade, and that includes the Windows version. Although there are scattered reports of problems, they don’t appear to be widespread. The other major browsers, including Firefox and Opera, already include a similar feature.

The other key issue is just to be careful about the files you download, whether via your browser or from an email message. If you have a Windows user in your contact list, certainly show additional caution in forwarding any questionable messages to them. While your Mac might not be vulnerable to most any malware those messages might contain, it makes no sense to subject your colleagues and friends on that other platform. It doesn’t serve them right for using Windows; they may have no choice in their particular line of work.

It’s also true that there are ways to infect a Mac, with AppleScript and such, so you can’t be assured that the unexpected, unknown attachment isn’t going to bite your Mac if launched.

Now many email systems these days offer antivirus protection for no extra cost. Certainly the popular free systems, including Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo, do offer various levels of malware security on their email servers, as does Apple with MobileMe. It appears that the ISP I use, Cox, only offers a PC package of desktop security software from McAfee, but there’s no indication at all that a Mac version is available, nor that there’s any native malware scanning of their email.

If you have a home or business Web site, you will want to check with your hosting provider to see how they handle email. Some companies offer the service and some don’t, and there are far too many of these firms for me to even begin to single out any particular choice. Let me just say that all of our email is scanned for malware before it hits our mailboxes.

You also have to constantly be on the lookout for social engineering schemes to make you succumb to an Internet criminal. While browsers do offer phishing protection, no system of this sort can be perfect. So when you receive email saying you must click on a link to go to a company’s site, well, just be careful. Letters that purport to come from PayPal or another financial institution or bank should be doubly suspect. The usual gambit is to fool you into clicking on the embedded link, which takes you to a fake site that closely resemblances the genuine article. You’re asked to give your personal login information which, in turn, gives the criminal license to steal your money.

So even if the ad you see doesn’t bear a Windows only label, it doesn’t hurt, I suppose, to check what the offering is all about, and maybe feel pity that the company hasn’t discovered where the personal computer world is moving.

Do you think maybe I’m being a little too lurid with this headline? As they said in that classic movie, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a…” Well, you get the picture, but in this case, I am quite serious. I think Microsoft is in serious trouble, more so because they are so flushed with high profits that their executives won’t face the truth.

Certainly, it’s hard to think of a company with a number one market position as beleaguered or facing eventual demise. Then again, with the current economic crisis taking down giants in the financial industry, you can bet that a company’s fortunes can quickly change, sometimes unexpectedly.

In Microsoft’s case, perhaps their failed ads featuring Bill Gates and comic Jerry Seinfeld reflect the mindset of Steve Ballmer and other key executives. They want to return to the glorious days of the 1990s, when Microsoft could do nothing wrong, and was conquering competitors right and left.

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

You love them, you hate them. The products are great, but some of the marketing and product initiatives are inscrutable. Even though Apple is supposedly doing surprisingly well during this holiday season, despite the economic downturn that may have not bottomed out, I’m sure they’ve also done plenty to upset customers in one way or another.

Take the recent report about Apple’s highly-touted DisplayPort digital monitor hookup scheme on the new note-books. The advantages are clear, because it merges both digital audio and video into a single tiny hookup, just like the HDMI ports you find on your high definition flat panel TV.

DisplayPort is based on an industry standard that, alas, also mandates severe copy protection methods, known as DisplayPort Content Protection (DPCP), and it’s come back to bite some new owners of these hot-selling note-books. It is, by the way, essentially the same as the HDCP measures used for HDMI.

While Apple’s new 24-inch LED Cinema Display, which is evidently starting to ship, also incorporates a DisplayPort, most displays and projectors don’t. Apple offers a VGA and DVI adapter at extra cost, and when you hook up a display by one of these “unprotected” methods, you cannot watch video content that’s encrypted with this copy protection technique. That includes Blu-ray DVDs, but also, apparently, many of the movies that you buy from iTunes.

Now I haven’t been able to confirm the published reports about this problem that have appeared at CNET, The Register and elsewhere. It does, however, pass the logic test, since we’re talking about an industry standard connection protocol here, not something Apple cooked up to incense Mac users, as they’ve done in the past with various proprietary ports.

It also means that Apple can’t do anything about it. HD content is licensed from the movie studios, and they set the rules. Industry-approved connection technologies also have their own set of requirements that Apple isn’t able to circumvent. It doesn’t seem to be a secret plot to get everyone to buy displays equipped with DisplayPort or HDMI, although you’ll have to consider those options if you want to view any of this HD content on an external display connected to one of the new note-books. Now it may be that there will be unofficial methods to crack this scheme — as there always are — but that’s not something that I would be able to discuss knowledgeably.

I’d also expect to see the next iMac incorporate the very same port, although most owners probably never hook up external monitors. For the Mac Pro, I don’t see a change. The Mac mini is anyone’s guess.

Of course, this isn’t the first time Apple has pulled what some might consider a stunt to get you to rush out to buy adapters or new peripherals. In 1998, when we were all comfortable using ADB input devices, LocalTalk printers, NuBus expansion cards and SCSI drives and scanners, Apple delivered the iMac. It sported Ethernet and USB — period! Now Ethernet had already become common on Macs, but USB was an alien visitor from PC-land.

Well, it didn’t take long for companies to make adapters and products with the right ports, and USB ended up being quite versatile, because you were able to group your printers, scanners, input devices and hard drives on the very same peripheral chain with a cheap hub or two. The arrival of USB 2.0 made hard drives near as fast as regular FireWire 400. Indeed, Apple has now ditched FireWire on its MacBook, so you can see what a decade has meant.

The next USB standard, 3.0, is said to be 10 times faster, but it’ll take a couple of more years for new Macs and peripherals to embrace that technology. So maybe adopting USB wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

Certainly, going all-USB on the iPod (and then the iPhone) has made it easier for PC users to acquire them, since few Windows boxes have FireWire. It also meant that Apple could save a small sum on each connection port, and that’s not a bad thing when they try to keep production costs down.

When it comes to the mass adoption of glossy screens on Apple’s note-books, that seems to be a more debatable issue. Well, maybe the raw materials are more environmentally safe, which can certainly help for a company that aspires to be thought of as “green.” But it can also cause havoc.

I know of one person, for example, who cannot tolerate glossy, because of the reflections you see in different lighting situations. It’s terribly distracting, and and I can see where third-party matte filters are going to become ubiquitous. It’s also questionable whether the glossy screen can be color calibrated as easily or accurately as matte, but the jury is out on that score.

Then again, if you want to rant about what Apple does or does not do, I bet you can come up with a long list of issues both big and small.

At the same time, you wonder why Apple would do things that don’t seem to make a whole lot of sense, at least at the time they remove a feature or switch technologies. In the long run, most of this stuff, despite the hassles they create, tend to work out, so should we cut Apple some slack?

No, I’m not that charitable. And you, gentle reader?