So I was visiting a long-time client the other day, restoring his data onto a new hard drive. Once I completed my tasks, he wanted to try out a few things for himself.

First, he opened Mail, launched Address Book and brought up a contact entry with a load of names. After looking them over for a moment, he started selecting and copying a few to paste into the To column on a new email message.

Well, I stopped him there, and tried, gently I assure you, to explain how contacts are supposed to be entered into Address Book how the Group feature works, and how his contact list can be accessed directly from Mail’s Address Panel, in the Window menu. He protested that he’s done it that way for years, and he’s not about to change now. So I let him be.

Next on the agenda was his method of closing applications, which involves manually closing each open window first, followed by choosing Quit from the application menu. This time I sold him the correct method as a time saver, replacing one command with several. “It may not make a difference for one application, but if you do that all day long, every single day, think of all the wasted effort.”

This time, he was willing to acknowledge my suggestion, saying he never heard of it being done that way before. However, he has been using Macs as a critical part of his home-based business since the early 1990s. So this seemed peculiar, and, in fact, I had not seen him to that before. Well, live and learn.

Of course this particular veteran Mac user isn’t the only person who developed a few wasteful habits over the years and refuses to change. While there are certainly different ways to reach the same goal, some of these behaviors can seem downright strange. Part of the problem is that a surprising number of people simply aren’t well informed about standard Mac conventions, such as the Finder, Open/Save dialogs and so on, even though they may have read a few books on the subject.

So I’m often put into the position of saying “Finder,” and hearing someone answer, “What’s that?”

Open/save dialogs are particularly confusing. It’s common for folks to double click on a document to open it, even if the application is already running. The concept of choosing Open from the File menu, or simply dragging the document icon to the application’s icon on the Dock is alien to them.

As with the concept of the Finder, they seem amazed when I try to demonstrate to them that there are methods that might be more efficient.

Speaking of the Dock: Some Mac users do not realize that, just because an application is no longer present in the Dock doesn’t mean it has somehow disappeared. The very client who inspired me to write this column is notorious for downloading applications over and over again because they vanished from the Dock once the application was quit.

After clearing a dozen Firefox icons from the client’s desktop on one occasion, I tried to show him how to make an application “stick” in the Dock, a tip that he followed for all of two weeks. I might also mention the fact that he had been using a mouse with his iBook G4 because he didn’t understand the purpose of the trackpad.

This is not to say that people who make mistakes of this sort are necessarily stupid. More than likely, they have other priorities in their lives, and they only mastered enough of the Mac user interface to help them become reasonably productive. They may not even have read an instruction manual or book on the subject. Perhaps someone demonstrated a few things to them, and they improvised the rest.

But it’s not just the individual user who is apt to make foolish mistakes. For regular people, you can forgive their technical shortcomings. I know there are lots of things I cannot do that you, perhaps, would accomplish easily and quickly.

Unfortunately, when the missteps are made by a tech support person, you have reason to be extremely concerned. When I visited that client to help him set up that new hard drive, he had just spent a frustrating 90 minutes on the phone with Cox, the local cable provider.

His face was turning red, but managed to spit out the details of the sad encounter. You see, that morning, upon his return from a trip to his country home in the northern part of Arizona, he found that he could not send or receive email on his Mac. He restarted the computer, with no change, so he contacted Cox’s support people. In turn, they passed him along to three different support people with no resolution.

After checking his Mac briefly, I asked him if anyone had him restart the cable modem. When he said no, I realized things had gotten pretty screwy. So that was my first plan of attack. The second was to recheck the settings on his single email account in Mail. It seems that Cox evidently asked him, during the diagnostic process, to change the port number for incoming messages on his POP account from the default 110 to 25 (a standard setting for outgoing mail).

I reverted the setting to the correct value, saved it, and the unread mail quickly came through.

I’d go on, but this article is not about tech support follies. I don’t want to go there, because I could fill a book with those war stories.

On the one hand, all the mobile phone carriers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to tell potential customers about their great products and service. Sometimes the ads are about the latest cool mobile device, but others talk about the superior network, with fewer dropped calls and more reception bars.

We have one carrier, Verizon Wireless, demonstrating rather graphically how their incredible network will follow you wherever you go. I guess the “can you hear me now” promotion has seen its day.

In the real world, however, mobile phones don’t always work so well. When it comes to voice quality, most calls sound inferior to what you can get with two tin cans and a single wire. Alexander Graham Bell must be spinning in his grave.

Part of the problem is the switch to all-digital cell phone systems. It appears the carriers are taking advantage of the technology and compressing signals more and more to handle additional simultaneous connections. That may help them support more customers, but it doesn’t necessarily play well with voice quality. Hearing the caller within a digital haze, or sounding as if they were talking to you from beneath the ocean, is just not acceptable. Surely they can do better.

I suppose any connection, so long as you don’t get too many dropped calls, is good enough for most customers. But didn’t a good enough philosophy help Microsoft rise to the top of the PC operating system business with me-too products?

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

All right, I know some of you have complained that I tend to write lurid headlines. Maybe there’s even a suggestion that the contents of the articles themselves don’t exactly match that promise.

I will quibble with you readers over that, particularly this time. After all, I’m sure most people would laugh loudly at even the suggestion that Microsoft is about to go out of business. They are, after all, the world’s largest software company, and their Windows operating system lives on over 90% of the personal computer desktops around the planet.

Sure Apple has made huge strides, with Macs now garnering over 10% market share when it comes to retail note-book sales, although global figures are still in the lower single digits. So where do I come up with that silly stuff about Microsoft?

First of all, I’m not suggesting that the executives at Microsoft are pulling the sort of shenanigans that did Enron in. That would seem to be a stretch. I also think that the SEC is, in light of the nation’s ongoing financial turmoil, more apt to observe signs that a company might be keeping extra sets of books or seriously fudging their profit and loss statements.

But let’s look where Microsoft is right now. Windows Vista has proven to be far less of a force in the enterprise than they hoped. Shipping several years late, without a few key features, it comes across as a bloated version of Windows XP with an updated, resource-heavy user interface. Sure, Microsoft has likely resolved some of the serious conflicts with third-party drivers and applications, but it’s not as if businesses are taking a second look in large numbers. In fact, many are buying new PCs and rolling back the operating system to XP.

Imagine, if you will, how people would treat Apple if significant numbers of Mac users bought new Macs and tried to induce them to run under Tiger. Sure there are people who still regard Leopard as buggy, but as the updates come forth, those numbers are diminishing. Besides, it’s probably not possible, since the operating system is closely entwined to the hardware, and it would take a lot of hacking to make older systems compatible, with no guarantee of success.

The promise of Vista’s successor, Windows 7, appears to be a mixed bag. Just the other day, Microsoft was suggesting that the bundled apps, covering email, instant messaging and so forth, might be pulled from the product. Instead, your new Windows desktop would include an icon to go to the Windows Live site to download what you want. Or maybe the PC makers would just add their own alternatives, such as Mozilla’s Thunderbird.

That, however, doesn’t appear to represent any huge amount of innovation, or any innovation for that matter. It’s just a case of musical chairs, though I can see that it might lessen antitrust concerns if the end user isn’t presented with a load of Microsoft junk on their hard drives.

Beyond Windows, there is the potential of a successor to Office 2007, and that, and the other software products Microsoft produces, are largely more of the same with extra features to entice you to buy the overpriced upgrades.

Outside of its core competency, Microsoft’s prospects are fuzzier. A third generation Zune lineup is out, but nobody seems to care. The successor to the Xbox 360 is supposedly under development, with Microsoft working on its own chip designs. However, just what expertise has Microsoft even demonstrated in such an endeavor anyway?

But the real straw that breaks the camel’s back is the recent news that Microsoft wants to buy back $40 billion dollars worth of its stock. Their efforts to acquire all or part of Yahoo are forgotten, and evidently Microsoft doesn’t want to pour more of their large horde of spare cash into research and development, to demonstrate a real penchant for innovation, rather than a simple claim.

Now I don’t know about you, but my suspicion here is that such a maneuver would do little more than increase the financial holdings of the executives and reduce the influence of individual shareholders. It would not end up allowing Microsoft to create and manufacturer superior products, or attempt further expansions beyond the software business.

It’s just a financial maneuver and nothing more. With Microsoft’s stock price fairly stagnant in recent years, why are they doing this now? Could it be that they expect some serious change to their financial prospects in the future, and they want to give their executives a chance to build golden parachutes for themselves in the event of a wholesale firing of large numbers of employees?

Considering what Apple can do with a fraction of the staff, you wonder what sort of efficiencies could be achieved over a Microsoft with competent management.

Indeed, just what are Microsoft’s real prospects for five years from now? Forget about ten years. Just the near future, where you expect at least one or two major operating system upgrades, and enhancements to their productivity applications.

Other than overpriced coffee tables riddled with touch sensors, just what is Microsoft going to do with themselves? Or are they planning to just take the money and run?

All right, does the world need another application to handle Podcasts on their iPhones? Well, Apple says they don’t, because such an application would duplicate the functions of iTunes, apparently, and thus an attempt to post such a product on the App Store was rejected.

Now as an early adopter of the Podcast concept, in my case as an online broadcaster, I welcome all possible avenues to present my shows. However, I don’t think I’m necessarily going to lose any listeners as a result of this particular episode. Otherwise, I’d be complaining loudly.

The main issue, of course, is whether Apple is abusing its authority as the ultimate judge of whether an application should be put up for sale at the App Store. There is no independent appeal process involved here. Apple says no, and that’s the way it is, unless you make appropriate changes to your app that might address their concerns.

Now, since this is Apple’s playground, they have the right to make the rules, and when you sign up for the iPhone SDK, you agree to accept those rules in developing your products for display on the App Store. You aren’t going to be able to call upon your legal advisers to negotiate terms. Take it or leave it.

While some people have complained wildly and loudly about Apple’s actions, let’s look at the practical results.

For one thing, Apple is trying to make sure that the applications offered for download by iPhone customers are safe and reliable. That is no mean achievement. No application is ever perfect, and certainly some of the products available for download can be troublesome. But, aside from crashing, they will not impact your phone’s security or steal your private data.

Consider the competition, such as the newly-minted T-Mobile G1 smartphone. It uses the new Google Android operating system, which is, like Linux (on which it’s based) totally open source, which means there is no central control over the platform or the software that runs on it.

Now I suspect a lot of you might find that to be an advantage, since it means that there’s no gatekeeper to prevent you from installing and using the applications you want. I suppose there are some benefits to that, at least as far as total freedom is concerned.

But what about the products that can crash constantly, or even impact performance of other software and perhaps the phone itself? What if they make undue demands on precious battery life? Even more important, what if they are riddled with potential security holes that would make it easy for someone to jailbreak your phone, without your permission, and install stuff on it that would compromise your security?

That is not a paranoid scenario. Making a platform available to most anyone who wants to apply, without proper vetting of the finished products, could cause chaos. Even within the Windows environment, allowing hundreds of PC makers to buy OEM licenses and install the operating system on their products has caused no end of trouble for them, for MIcrosoft, and for those of you who continue to use Windows.

In a large part, Apple’s vertically integrated system has resulted in products that mostly work as advertised, and perform in predictable ways.

This isn’t to say that the iPhone, iPod or even your Mac is perfect. You know they aren’t, and certainly I’ve spent occasions silently cursing Apple or some outside company when things don’t work properly.

When it comes to the iPhone, it’s also a large learning experience. Apple went from nothing to having the most talked about smartphone on the planet in a matter of months. The iPhone SDK wasn’t released until this spring, and has undergone regular updates since then. The first iteration of the App Store debuted on July 11th, so we’re talking about something extremely new, and not tested for a long period in the marketplace.

Since releasing iPhone 2.0, Apple has offered three firmware updates. Some fixed unnamed bugs, while others addressed connectivity issues and application crashes. If you examine the online chatter, you’ll see what there’s still work to be done.

So far, the promised push notification feature is missing in action. It would have allowed more seamless operation for such applications as AIM, but published reports suggest the feature was pulled from a recent iPhone developer release. Now that might be because Apple had to hunker down and address other issues first. Since the feature was demonstrated at a WWDC, I expect it will return shortly, and may still make its debut before the end of the month, though I wouldn’t be surprised to see it drift until October.

When it comes to the application review and approval process, I don’t think anyone is going to dispute the fact that it’s a work in progress too. It may even be inconsistent, depending on how many Apple employees are actually involved. In other words, one person might accept a product, while a similar product is summarily rejected by someone else.

Over time, as the development process matures, I expect things will get better. But apps that seem to directly compete with Apple’s own may still end up in the reject bin. While Apple may be right in some situations, I don’t think they have much to lose to allow some of these applications to go on sale.

RIght now, after all, you aren’t tethered to iWork if you want to run a word processor or a spreadsheet on your Mac. You can choose from Microsoft Office and other alternatives. You can run none of them, or all of them, and use the tool that suits best for a specific task. No harm done at all, and it would be great to also see a little more developer freedom at the App Store. But, as I said, it’s a work in progress, still, and things will hopefully change for the better over time.