Most of you know that Microsoft’s Mac Office apps all originated on the Mac in the 1980s, before they were duplicated on the then-fledgling Windows platform. Now before you remind me about that old political gaffe about being in favor of something before you were against it, that should, in theory, indicate that the world’s largest software developer ought to be able to build the best Mac products on the planet.

But that is not necessarily true.

Sure, Office for the Mac has a huge market share. That may be due, in large part, to the fact that people who switched from Windows want to work with what, to them at least, is the tried and the true, and not have to seek out a new set of productivity applications. In multi-platform environments, the system admins prefer to have equivalent software for their Mac and PC users. It sure lessens the learning curve, and enhances compatibility.

After occasional stumbles, it’s also true that Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit has tried hard to infuse the appropriate Mac-like interface elements into their software. If anything, Office for the Mac is probably superior to the Windows version, even thought the latter sports extra stuff.

Unfortunately, perhaps in the drive to provide comparable products, Office for the Mac suffers from the same useless complexities of the typical Windows product. We all know, for example, about the deep-seated menus in Word that offer functions few ever heard of or perhaps will ever need. One of the big selling points of Office 2001, the last Classic version, and Office 2008, the first Universal version, was discoverability. That means making the hidden features more accessible, so you can take advantage of the sheer power of these applications.

However, you sometimes wonder when enough is enough. Apple, in contrast, is perennially spare with its features, and only adds them over time, in a gradual fashion. In fact there are still some Classic Mac OS capabilities that have yet to find their way into Mac OS X. It may well be that they’ll never appear, or that Apple will simply find a different — hopefully better — way of doing things.

Unlike Microsoft, with its committee-based approach, Apple doesn’t appear to build software based on bullet points of features.

One blatant example of Microsoft’s overkill is Entourage 2008, which may be the least changed component of Office 2008. Now I’ve had a love/hate relationship with the program over the years. I like its auto-correct feature when writing email, but I then encounter one of its quirks, and, as the frustration grows, I return to Apple Mail.

In large part, Entourage is descended from Microsoft’s original Mac email application, Outlook Express. That, in turn, contained some of the concepts that originally appeared in Claris Emailer before that application was folded. Indeed, many of the members of the original Emailer programming team went to Microsoft to work on Outlook Express.

To be sure, if you take Outlook Express for the Mac and learn it fully, you’ll understand much of the layout of Entourage. Of course, you have to fold in the calendar and task management feature.

I returned to Entourage a few days ago, when I encountered some difficulties with IMAP email handling in Mail. I contacted the support team at HostGator to find out why I was getting such weird prompts as “You exceeded mail quota” when Mail tried to parse junk mail or when I attempted to move a message from one IMAP folder to another.

Before you ask, my actual email storage quota, which I can configure myself since we lease the entire Web server, is twice what we actually use. The problem that confounded HostGator’s admins was that the message was random, and not always repeated. They responded that they felt Entourage had superior IMAP handling, so I gave it a try. Alas, the error messages still appeared, but they were more obscure, such as “Unable to add message to IMAP mailbox.” Yes, that’s Microsoft for you.

As I navigated through Entourage’s IMAP account settings, I found several times as many as Apple offers, with little, if any, explanation as to what they did and why I’d use them. Indeed, when HostGator’s admins suggested some specific settings, I found that they were not necessarily the defaults, as opposed to Mail, where the proper settings are usually configured automatically if you use the Setup Assistant. Go figure.

Finally, the source of the email setting was traced to a problematic default quota configuration on the server, which was fixed using a function in the Web Host Manager configuration panel. I decided to stick with Entourage for a while to see if really represented a superior solution. Alas, I encountered another long-term problem with the application, the failure to update email messages despite the correct scheduling. In theory, it should check for new messages at the repeating interval you select. In practice, sometimes you have to click on the Inbox of an account for it to update. No amount of rejiggering preferences seems to eliminate the problem, which is random.

Since this Entourage quirk is something I have encountered with every single version, with different email servers, I decided to choose simplicity over needless complexity and unreliability. I’m back to Mail again, and I’m so glad I don’t need to access a MIcrosoft Exchange server, where I would not be able to consider such a move.

And, don’t get me started about the weird errors Keychain Access reports when you run Keychain First Aid after setting up Entourage.

I still remember, nearly 20 years ago, setting up a brand new Macintosh system in my home. Up till then, I did most of my work at the office, but I had seen the future, more or less, and telecommuting was going to be a large part of it, so I had to be prepared.

Now I had used Macs at the office almost from day one, as soon as they become practical solutions for getting real work done. But I was also losing assignments, because I couldn’t complete them after the workday ended.

In any case, not 15 minutes after opening QuarkXPress to edit a document, I got a system error prompt. If you remember the days of System 6, there would even be a Restart button in the dialog, but it would rarely do anything, and that was the case this time. So I forced a restart, and got back to work.

In those days, a stable Mac was one that didn’t crash a couple of times a day, and it was awfully easy for that to happen, particularly if you fitted your Mac with lots of third-party stuff. Even the useful hacks, such as the ones that would allow you to select fonts without going through the drudgery of using the traditional method, Font/DA Mover, could do nasty things. The reason is that the developers had to use unsupported tricks to fool the system into accepting their unorthodox way of handling your font library.

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

Consider what Steve Jobs said in his widely-quoted employee memo about the failed rollout of MobileMe, that Apple could have waited somewhat longer to make sure things were working properly before transitioning from .Mac.

He clearly had a point, but he really isn’t going far enough. You see, it has been clear to me for the last several years that marketing considerations and not product readiness are playing too much of a role in Apple’s recent release dates.

Certainly that was probably also true with the iPhone 3G and version 2.0 software. You can see that in the 3G-related issues, which were supposedly addressed, at least in part, in the 2.0.2 update. Then again, if what Roughly Drafted Magazine’s Daniel Eran Dilger suggests in a recent article, it may require all or most iPhone 3G users upgrading the firmware before the problems settle down. That is unless there’s another update forthcoming to expand upon the list of bug fixes.

But you have to wonder here whether Apple could have perhaps spent more time field testing their new phone before it was released. Wouldn’t that have revealed some of these connection issues? Perhaps, or perhaps not. It may be the combination of having lots of iPhones in the same area that causes network congestion and other problems that contribute to disconnects and slow Internet performance.

As to the other key issue, involving unstable applications, it’s true that developers only had a few months to build brand new software for a brand new programming platform. Yes, it’s highly related to Apple’s desktop version of OS X, but there are enough differences to cause trouble. In time, one expects it’ll get better.

So when might Apple have released these products and services? That’s a really good question, and I wouldn’t presume to know. It may be one of those things, and releasing the iPhone and the new firmware on August 11th would have made little, if any, difference. The problems might not have revealed themselves until millions of users bought them and put them into service.

As far as MobileMe is concerned, no question about it. If the service debuted after Labor Day, to give it more time to bake in the development ovens, would it have made any significant difference? Would you care if you didn’t get Push notification support for the service formerly known as .Mac right away? It’s not as if it’s a critical issue, since real business users would probably be more interested in the enhanced support for Microsoft Exchange.

Or at least that’s the theory.

It is not just Apple’s newest gear that might have been released too early. Consider Leopard. It was delayed several months supposedly to give developers more time to finish the iPhone before they returned to work on Tiger’s successor. Assuming that was true, Apple was in a bind, as late October of 2007 was perhaps the latest release date that would allow for the new operating system to be in the hands of customers for the holiday season. Certainly stellar sales resulted, but a 10.5.1 update was required real fast to address, among other things, an obscure Finder bug that could have corrupted or destroyed data when you copied it over a network. Why didn’t they discover that during the test process?

Why indeed!

Then there were the very first Intel-based Macs. Here Apple’s marketing people were also situated between a rock and a hard place, as the anticipation of the new generation of Macs was widely expected to hurt sales of PowerPC models. Now maybe it didn’t have all that much effect in retrospect, but that was because the highest-selling Macs were updated early in 2006.

For the most part, the new Intel hardware worked well enough. But there were problems with expanding batteries, excessive heat, and, in the first run of the new MacBooks, discoloration of the cases. All this stuff smacks of rushed release schedules and insufficient product testing.

Yes, the Intel chips themselves were of a new generation, but surely Apple had sufficient time to anticipate cooling issues and the plastic fabrication defects should not have been difficult to address before the production lines were started. It’s not as if the new MacBooks were so drastically different from the models they replaced.

To be fair to Apple, I don’t pretend to know the ins and outs of their product development process, nor the full extent of the pressures invoked by marketing people to ship on time regardless. Obviously there are compromises to be made. No product is ever perfect, and a mass-market company has to decide when things are good enough to ship, and where issues can be appropriately resolved later with ongoing production changes or software updates.

In the end, perhaps Apple’s early release issues were unavoidable. The fact that their sales are much higher these days means that more and more users will have the new products early, and any lingering problems will manifest themselves that much quicker.

But if Apple has learned anything from the MobileMe debacle, they will, one hopes, consider the potential hazards a little more carefully when they set shipping dates.

I was patiently waiting on the phone, trying to make a service appointment with a company, when the receptionist came back on the phone and apologized for the delay. She fretted how her PC was taking forever to load the pages of their scheduling software, but finally managed, with further delays, to get me booked.

The other day, I was listening to a talk show on Sirius satellite radio, when an ad came on, extolling the virtues of a product that was guaranteed to “remove the sludge from your PC” and have it running in peak condition in short order. For a second, I almost thought I was listening a promotional spot about an oil additive for your car.

Of course, the “sludge” that announcer was talking about included corrupted registry files and other ills, such as adware, that conspire to bring even the most powerful Windows PC to its knees.

I can think back over the past few weeks, visiting banks and other PC-dependent companies and encountering the very same symptoms. An employee is trying to get some very simple work done, such as scheduling or processing a transaction, but the computer seems to have a mind of its own.

Now in some cases, such as a bank, slowdowns of this sort might be the result of congested network traffic. In that case, the source of the problem may lie in an entirely different location, at a server farm that manages the complicated financial manipulations in which banks traditionally engage during the normal course of business.

But when you’re visiting a small company, with at most a handful of PCs, and store traffic is slow, you don’t expect such issues to occur. None of the applications they typically use are CPU or RAM hogs, so even a basic PC ought to be able to handle the tasks smoothly.

I then think back to a visit I made to a client in a nearby city a couple of years ago. He had just received a PC, passed off to him by the spouse of a deceased relative. Running Windows XP, this particular computer, a Gateway, was no more than a year old, and was a mid-range model, with more than sufficient processing power and memory to support email and Web browsing. It should have been lightning quick, but even the most basic tasks seemed to take forever to complete. For just a second, my mind drifted back to my feeble attempts to run QuarkXPress on a Mac Classic way back in 1991.

Well, I ran some malware detection software on that PC, which supposedly cleaned out a number of infections involving spyware and other afflictions, but improvements were minor. No, I didn’t try one of those so-called “sludge removers,” though I grant that restoring the system might have set things right.

As that radio ad states, though, this appears to be a frighteningly normal situation in Windows land. A computer runs great out of the box, but after a year of regular use, it gradually slows down to a point where it may actually seem considerably slower than the model it replaced. Not good.

Yes, there are fixer-uppers out there that, if run periodically, will probably restore performance to reasonably normal levels. That’s what helps the companies who develop those utilities to stay in business and afford those visits to the gas pumps.

While I try to act cool and professional in those situations, I sometimes ask a local businessperson encountering such difficulties if they ever considered a Mac. Alas, that’s not such an easy choice. Bank processing software and many of the standard retail point-of-sale and general office management applications are strictly Windows based.

Even where there may be Mac equivalents, the bill of particulars can get fairly expensive. It’s not just the new Macs, but the software licenses, installation, and retraining. There may even be an extended downtime in order to transfer data from one platform to the other — and if they can’t do that, the migration simply isn’t worth the bother.

These are business sectors where the Mac frequently has little if any presence. They are also ripe for the picking, simply by building a laundry list of the troubles business owners and their system admins frequently confront and demonstrating how the Mac can solve them.

Alas, Apple doesn’t really do much in the way of direct promotion to many of these businesses. Do you even know, for example, of a bank run by Macs? I’m just asking.

Yes, Apple does have a great story to tell these companies. They even have areas on their Web site that cater strictly to businesses, offering compelling solutions that can address many needs, particularly for smaller companies. Some of these products are turnkey solutions. They can be easily installed and deployed without the need of having an IT department with the appropriate certification certificates.

I rather suspect that the growth of the iPhone as a business tool, and the increased market penetration of Macs in the enterprise will help this sad situation. But I don’t expect to stop hearing those complaints about slow PCs at the office anytime soon.