In the 1980s, Bill Gates told Apple’s CEO at the time, John Sculley (the former soft drink executive), that he should license the Mac OS. As far as Gates was concerned, Apple would own the market.

Well, what really happened was that Sculley, in his infinite stupidity, actually licensed some of the Mac OS to Microsoft, and that gave them a wedge to build Windows and, along with clever marketing, bait and switch and smoke and mirrors, allowed Gates and company to become the world’s largest software maker.

Apple finally relented and began to license Mac OS clone computers in the mid-1990s. They hoped to expand the market for the company into segments they couldn’t hope to reach all by themselves. However, the ill-considered program allowed other companies to go after Apple’s core markets with a vengeance, with faster and cheaper hardware.

That and other foolish decisions nearly did the company in, and you can well understand why Steve Jobs killed cloning with the finesse of a master slasher shortly after he took over as “interim” CEO. A leaner, meaner Apple became a major success, and most of you know the rest of the story.

With the arrival of Intel-based Macs, many felt it would be pretty simple to induce Mac OS X to run on ordinary PC hardware. In fact, it is, although it requires a few command line tricks to get it to function. There’s plenty of online information on the process, so I won’t bother to summarize it here, except to say that installing Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware violates the user license.

Apple didn’t bother to go after the small number of individuals who built Mac OS clones, mostly as hobbies. They didn’t even call out the lawyers against Macworld’s Rob Griffiths when he did the very same thing for a feature article, since it was done purely as an experiment, and not as the beginning of a venture to sell such products in the retail marketplace.

Psystar, however, a Florida-based company, is in hot water with Apple because it tried to turn a hobby into a commercial enterprise. While attorneys may evaluate the pros and cons of the legal position of the two opposing sides, let’s look at the practical consequences if Apple were to allow official operating system licensing.

Now we know that the major PC makers would love it. There is a widely-quoted email from Michael Dell admitting that his company would be delighted to offer Mac OS X to their customers, and I’m sure the executives from HP, Acer and other PC makers would agree.

It is not going to happen, however, except in the unlikely event that Apple loses that lawsuit it filed against Psystar. Indeed, if it did suffer a defeat in the courts, that might mean the end of Apple as you know and love it.

You see, Apple succeeds largely by providing integrated solutions, with the hardware and software tightly knit to provide a carefully-tailored user experience. Where Microsoft licensed its PlaysForSure technology to allow third party consumer electronics makers to build their own digital media players to compete with the iPod, it was an abject failure. In the end, Microsoft tried — and failed — to duplicate Apple’s strategy with the Zune, which meshes its own hardware and software solution.

So it’s not just vertical integration, but doing it right that counts, and that is why Apple succeeded first with the Mac, then with the iPod and now with the iPhone. While they all suffer from the usual number of software defects, everything is designed to work together and they usually perform seamlessly. That’s why Apple’s products get the “just work” label, because it happens to be true most of the time.

The other factor is that Apple earns the lion’s share of its income from hardware. Mac OS X retail upgrades provide only a fraction of their earnings.

If Apple were to license Mac OS X, perhaps they would sell several times as many upgrade packages as they do now, but with loads of cheap PCs running the operating system, sales of Mac hardware would seriously suffer.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that Macs are overpriced. Despite that repeated claim, when you compare both the hardware components and the bundled software, Macs and PCs are usually comparably priced. Sometimes one is more expensive than the other, sometimes the reverse. As you move up the line, Apple even does better. As I’ve mentioned previously, for example, a Mac Pro is way cheaper than a Dell Precision Workstation with the equivalent options.

The second issue is one of compatibility. By having to test its operating system for a relatively small number of systems, Apple can build its operating systems faster and with greater reliability. One of the huge problems Microsoft confronts regularly is that its products must run on tens of thousands of possible configurations. They are forced to hire more quality control people, and it takes far longer for them to release major Windows upgrades. And that doesn’t even consider a less efficient development environment.

It’s also important to mention that Microsoft gets most of its Windows income from OEM sales direct to manufacturers. Sales of upgrade kits play only a minor role in their financial picture. If they had to depend on the latter, and not on those tight, legacy contracts with PC makers, they wouldn’t do near as well.

In the end, cloning may expand the audience for Mac OS X, but it would seriously cripple Apple, and, in fact, seriously hurt their prospects for future prosperity. That’s not what they want, and I suspect that’s not what you want either.

In show business, you often hear the phrase “overnight sensation” when someone suddenly becomes famous. But the truth is quite often left unsaid, that the person in question actually struggled as a virtual unknown for years before finding the brass ring.

Now you can’t say Apple took terribly long to become a major player in the personal computer industry, particularly with such early successes as the Apple II. But it’s also true that, having lost the race for dominance in the operating system wars, Apple languished for quite some time.

Sure, a leaner, meaner company under Steve Job’s leadership quickly returned to profitability. But for a long time it seemed as if Macs were indeed going to be consigned to niche status, with sales of less than 800,000 units per quarter. It also meant that Mac market share was around 2% of the world market, and it was easy to consider the company a tiny player that would probably never amount to anything significant in the world of personal computers.

Indeed, not only did Apple concede leadership to Microsoft early on, but it appeared there were no real competitors on the horizon. Some thought that an open source operating system, Linux, might be a contender, but its desktop alternatives are generally nothing more than pale imitations of Windows. While Linux is a significant factor when it comes to servers — and in fact we use a Linux server for our sites — attempts to transform it for the desktop, other than for power users, haven’t amounted to much.

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

It’s hard to believe how many product lines used to bear the Apple logo — or at least the rainbow-colored version that was in vogue in the last century. The original PostScript laser printers, known under the collective moniker of LaserWriter, came from Apple, although the guts of the early versions were actually built by Canon.

More recently, Apple was one of the first manufacturers to sell digital cameras, and let’s not forget the late, lamented Newton, not to mention its larger cousin, the eMate.

Indeed, at one time, it was very possible to equip your entire computer system, from mouse to output device, with Apple-branded products. But no more.

When Steve Jobs became Apple’s interim or iCEO in 1997, the company was hemorrhaging millions of dollars, and he savagely ditched a number of products that he felt did detracted from their core competency. Of course, those product lines — and the Mac OS cloning program — were mostly money losers (or earned very little), the primary consideration when he put his scalpel to them.

Now that the word “beleaguered” no longer appears before the name Apple, tech pundits are working overtime guessing what product segments the company needs to enter. What they fail to realize, of course, is that Apple succeeds by picking and choosing market segments carefully. Far too many consumer electronics makers release products as if they were darts, hoping that if they fire enough of them aloft, a few will land on target and became huge successes.

The entertainment and publishing industries take this very same approach. So even if you are published, or get a movie or recording deal, there’s no guarantee that your product will ever be successful, let alone get any promotional effort. You might fare better at the Las Vegas gaming tables, or on Wall Street.

So don’t be surprised if there is no networked flat panel TV released with an Apple label. Besides, a big box product of that sort would present a major problem when it comes to displaying at an Apple Store or even in the Apple sections of such major retailers as Best Buy. Besides, not everyone has an SUV on hand with which to take home a 50-inch HDTV, so Apple would have to make agreements with outside delivery firms. WIth its present lineup, everything Apple builds can be carried home in any vehicle, even a Smart minicar, although I’m not certain how well the Smart’s rear compartment would handle a Mac Pro.

More to the point, the flat panel TV space is saturated, with loads and loads of commodity products and not all that much room for Apple to make a difference. Other companies are taking the grocery store approach here, making small profits and hoping to make it all up on volume. That’s another business strategy that Apple refuses to employ.

With wireless handsets, Apple clearly realized that smartphones had lots of untapped potential, which they are attempting to fill with the iPhone. Clearly, by beating RIM and the famous BlackBerry in the last quarter, Apple has shown they have the product and the marketing muscle to excel way beyond most any analyst’s expectations — even their own for that matter.

So what else is left for Apple to consider?

For now, with the shaky economic climate, the Apple TV is still regarded by Steve Jobs as a hobby. Evidently it’ll continue in production, but there’s no indication just what direction it might take. In the end, the market may tell them that, not to mention the feedback from customers who make suggestions about additions and changes to the present features.

In terms of other product categories, I would not expect any new digital cameras with the Apple logo on them either. Although they were one of the pioneers in that industry, today such cameras are commodities, and far too cheap to allow for a reasonable profit for each unit sold. We return to the grocery store approach here too.

There will never be another Newton, since handhelds are being largely supplanted with smartphones, but what about the eMate? That was Apple’s $800 “netbook” that never realized its full potential either. In fact, we had one for a while. My son received one for a single school year, but never really found a use for it.

But today’s netbook is what Apple regards as a nascent product category with possible future potential. Imagine a relatively inexpensive, no-frills note-book computer that presents itself as a grown-up iPhone? It would have a larger screen, a full-sized keyboard, and strictly wireless networking, other than the docking port for recharging.

If that sort of sounds like today’s MacBook Air, you’re right, except that the concept envisions a smaller, far less expensive device, perhaps retailing around $699 or so. This isn’t to say that Apple is jumping into the netbook arena any time soon either, but by admitting they are watching the scene, you can bet there are prototypes in Apple’s labs that are being readied in case they decide to proceed with production.

Where else should Apple go? Well, I suspect there’s far too much uncertainty right now to even hazard a guess, and, for once, I rather suspect Steve Jobs would agree with me.

One line still used by politicians running for reelection is that they did a good job and want to continue to perform in a similar fashion, to stay the course. That is, unless things are going badly, in which case they try to reinvent themselves as reformers, who will fight all those big, bad politicians.

Of course, they will probably find the worst offender simply by looking in the mirror.

In any case, during a surprise guest shot during Apple’s meeting with financial analysts this week, Steve Jobs answered some questions and delivered a tantalizing hint or two of what was going to come. That should keep the rumor sites buzzing until Macworld Expo 2009, where the speculation will be shown to be true or false.

It does seem that, despite his reputation as a master at the great art of verbal spin, Jobs was refreshingly honest in some of his comments. Take, for example, his remarks about the present state of economic uncertainty: “We are not economists. Your next door neighbor can likely predict what’s going to happen as well as we can.”

And possibly better.

As far as those future products are concerned, Jobs admitted they were watching the “nascent” category of netbooks — cheap, low-feature note-book computers — closely, but hadn’t decided whether it was worth their attention as a future product category.

When it comes to Jobs, of course, you can’t always know for certain where his intentions really lie. He might, for example, dismiss a product category outright, and then introduce it a short time later. Consider the Mac mini, for example. During a certain analyst meeting in the fall of 2004, Apple’s financial people were asked whether the company was going to enter the low-cost PC space. They said no. Sure enough, at Macworld Expo 2005, in San Francisco, the Mac mini was unveiled.

Now it’s also true that the mini probably hasn’t fulfilled its promise sufficiently for Apple to deliver regular upgrades. There are even published reports from Europe that it has reached end of life status, with no indication whatever that a successor is waiting in the wings.

We’ll probably know for certain when the expected iMac refresh arrives later this month. If there’s no accompanying Mac mini speed bump, perhaps using the same NVIDIA motherboard that premiered in the new MacBooks, you’ll know the mini’s days are numbered.

That, of course, would be unfortunate. I always saw tremendous potential in the mini. For one thing, it was a cheap way for Windows switchers to adopt the Mac and still keep their existing monitors and input devices. But not just Windows users. One of my clients actually sold off his Power Mac G4 and replaced it with a Mac mini. For him, it was just the perfect computer, and actually a whole lot faster than the one he had, despite the mini’s well-known performance limits.

Consider all those millions who buy $399 PC bundles at Wal-Mart. At $599, the mini might seem pricey. But if they’re on a budget, paying $999 for the entry-level MacBook may be way out of reach, particularly in difficult economic times.

The question is, of course, whether Apple is really losing lots of potential sales there, and whether the profit margins are even worth the bother. Besides, isn’t it also true that more and more personal computer users are ditching desktops and relying strictly on note-books?

In fact, when I interviewed Bob “Dr. Mac” LeVitus for this week’s episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE, he confessed that he now does all his work on a MacBook Pro. Sure, it’s often connected to separate input devices and an Apple display when he’s in his home office, but this is his ideal all-in-one solution.

More to the point, over 60% of all Macs sold these days are note-books. So they might indeed feel there’s no incentive for Apple to develop any more desktop models at this point in time. It’s not as if they can or should occupy every potential market segment. They pick and choose carefully, and you can bet they gave careful thought to a thin and light note-book before the MacBook Air debuted.

Now I remain among those who stick with a dedicated desktop Mac. While I wouldn’t buy it personally, I still see potential for that “mythical midrange Mac minitower” or headless iMac that some of us have been clamoring for.

But if desktop PCs are truly yesterday’s news, where’s the incentive to develop yet another entrant into this segment? Besides, if the current economic crisis continues without letup through the coming year, Apple will have to fight tooth and nail to sell you the products they have, and the prospects for new gear have lessened considerably, at least for now.

On the other hand, Apple’s existing lineup seems powerful enough to definitely withstand the worst the economy can throw at them. That is, so long as there are still enough people around who are able to buy.