In the past, software publishers were ragged for delivering applications to Mac users that were far too reminiscent of the Windows platform. WordPerfect got a bad start as a result, and perhaps they never lived it down. What’s more, when Microsoft delivered Word 6, it came across as a poor handmaiden to the Windows version, complete with notoriously foreign interface conventions.

In all this, I suppose Mac users felt lucky if a Windows developer deigned to build a Mac version, so, aside from interface and performance complaints, we were mostly content. Well, some of you anyway, and it’s fair to think that perhaps they made it Windows-like so you’d just get disgusted at get a real PC and be done with it.

Fast forward to 2008, where Macs sales are soaring, and, in recent years, there’s evidence that Apple wants to finally break into the enterprise, after ignoring it for so many years. This doesn’t mean that larger businesses didn’t use Macs. In most cases, they were consigned to the art department, where those “eccentric” content creators wouldn’t touch a PC with a ten-foot pole.

These days, the boss buys a Mac or an iPhone, and then exhorts the IT people to figure out a way to incorporate these fancy gadgets into their workflow.

However, Apple’s entering a major new phase of their marketing strategy, which began, to some extent, with the introduction of iTunes for Windows and later a versionof Safari for that platform. Now just releasing a Windows version  is but part of the story. While Apple has been lambasted in some quarters of the tech press for this, they went ahead and retained a huge chunk of the Mac interface in the Windows version. That, my friends, is what some of those software publishers have done in reverse to Mac users all these years.

What helped, of course, was the iPod, which has a user base that’s far more Windows than Mac. The iPod gave millions of people a look at Apple technology, and, when they use iTunes to manage their songs and movies, they are living within something that resembles the Mac OS X user environment. Safari only expands the joy.

I don’t know if you’ve used Safari for Windows, but it’s so close to the Mac version in some ways that you might think you’re working on a Mac at times, unless you look real carefully. No, I’m not going to get involved in Apple’s controversial efforts to get folks to download a copy, by leaving the option checked in its Software Update panel.

But these are consumer-related initiatives. Up till now, Apple hasn’t done a whole lot to expand beyond the small business user, but the iPhone 3G will change all that. First and foremost, Apple licensed Microsoft’s ActiveSync technology to provide full support for Exchange servers for push email and calendars.

Indeed, we learned of that a few weeks ago, but now we also know that Apple is doing the same for the next version of Mac OS X, code-named Snow Leopard. Now 10.6 won’t be a feature release, although Exchange support is a feature. Instead it will offer performance boosts, and a smaller footprint. The latter appears to be coming from ditching support for PowerPC Macs, but it will be otherwise the same in basic functionality as today’s Leopard.

So where is Apple going from here?

Well, take a look at the forthcoming MobileMe, with its PC-style logo. You can’t call a set of Web services .Mac if you want to reach Windows users, although I am not going to use the me.com address for my email unless I’m dragged to that point kicking and screaming.

What’s more, the applications in the cloud that Apple gives you with MobileMe will very much resemble their Mac OS X counterparts, particularly Address Book and Mail. The intent here is to push this service as much to Windows users as the existing Mac user base, and this means that there will be another way for Apple to expose that other computing platform to the Mac OS X’s interface.

Clever that.

Now where is Apple going to go from here? Well, that’s a good question. Consider: In this week’s episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE, commentator Kirk McElhearn suggests that Apple might indeed produce an expandable Mac priced just above the Mac mini to cater to business users, the folks who buy PCs by the tens of thousands.

As with the “mythical midrange minitower” or headless iMac some of us have been talking about for quite a while now, it would offer roughly half the expandability of the Mac Pro, so you’d be able to install an extra hard drive, an extra PCI-based peripheral card, and several extra RAM sticks.

Most important, it’ll be an easy box for IT professionals to upgrade in minutes, in the tradition of the Mac Pro and Power Mac G5. Unlike the Mac mini, you won’t need a putty knife or other implement to get inside.

If such a model is accompanied by a huge marketing push from Apple, all these forces may coalesce to give Apple the enterprise credibility they have lacked for so long. You heard it first here.

The other day I read a story in which it was reported that Apple’s market cap dropped some $19 billion within days because of concerns about the health of CEO Steve Jobs. Indeed, this feeling was buttressed by photos showing Jobs appearing somewhat emaciated in certain poses during his WWDC keynote.

Now considering his massive presence at Apple and his legendary vision that evidently translates itself into incredible consumer-oriented products, you have to wonder how or even if Apple would survive if he left the company — or just became too ill to continue his job.

Certainly, as a survivor of pancreatic cancer, Jobs is extremely lucky. He suffered from a variety of that condition that was treatable; most are not. In fact, my mother-in-law, bless her soul, died of pancreatic cancer years ago, just days before she was due to be admitted into an experimental program. But even then, they didn’t hold out much hope for her longevity in the best of circumstances.

While Jobs is reportedly fully recovered, or at least that’s what Apple tells us, you can see where there’s a greater sensitivity to issues of health. As part of his cancer treatment, for example, Jobs has experienced weight loss, which is supposedly normal in such situations, so that might explain why he seems a little too thin. No, there’s no intimation that he has an anorexia-related condition.

In response to questions about his health, Apple said Jobs caught a “bug,” which seems reasonable. I remember an Apple meeting some years back, before the cancer episode, where Jobs was sneezing occasionally. But we didn’t harbor concerns about his health then.

Now Jobs has already been asked the touchy question about succession, and has said that there are a number of fully-qualified executives at the company who could run Apple in the event of his departure, planned or otherwise.

I have no doubt that this is true, in large part. Certainly Jobs is not an engineer, and he’s not a programmer. While he has what can only be described as a genius-level capability of motivating his troops to produce truly great and incredibly innovative products, clearly there are others at Apple who must carry out his wishes — or demands. More to the point, not all of the great ideas at Apple originate with its CEO.

All we know about his management style is largely legendary. He seems to be a mercurial character in public, and reports of former Apple employees — who might surely have axes to grind — indicate that he will engage in big-time head games and literally yell at both executives and regular employees alike to force them to deliver the goods. If you give him a new idea, he’ll allegedly challenge you near to the point of tears to justify your creation and prove it has merit.

If you survive this painful process, you get to keep your job, and maybe, just maybe, get a promotion if your work continues to past muster.

Some feel that Apple VP Phil Schiller is a potential CEO candidate. When not playing comedy relief to Jobs during a keynote address, he comes across as smart, articulate, with a great sense of humor. Does he have a vision? Who knows? Can he manage the team and continue to build successors to today’s Macs, the iPod, the iPhone and expand those initiatives into other eras of potential success?

Honestly, I just don’t know. Certainly other executives at Apple and elsewhere are considered potential CEO candidates, and I wouldn’t presume to understand their capabilities under fire, but I can understand the concerns. After Jobs departed the company he co-founded in the mid-1980s, Apple went through a spate of incompetent executives who began an endless downward spiral that nearly did the company in.

When Jobs convinced Apple to buy NeXT in 1996, Apple was on the ropes. Its efforts to produce a successor to the aging, rickety Mac OS had been unsuccessful, after years of trying. The Mac OS clone program had been a failure, and the clone makers, contrary to what Apple expected at the time, went after the mother ship’s core market with a vengeance.

How Jobs managed the palace coup behind the scenes isn’t important. What is important is that he regained control, and cast of the dead wood, including the cloning program. Apple became a leaner, meaner company, with noticeably less revenue for a number of years before the great explosion began and the company rose from the ashes to become the huge success it is today.

Could Apple find another corporate whip-cracker with the right vision and the wherewithal to set goals and see them through to completion? I expect they can, and I also expect that some of the existing executives are being tested to see if they are capable of replacing Steve Jobs.

But those are big shoes to fill, and I can see where Wall Street is getting concerned even at the hint that Jobs may be experiencing a bout of poor health. May he live long and prosper. I don’t think anyone at Apple would like consider the prospects of a successor anytime soon.

You know, I sometimes think most everyone has gone crazy when we calculate browser speeds in fractions of a second and then argue which application is faster. So on one hand, Safari 3.1 is faster than Firefox 2, but Firefox 3 might have taken the edge all over again.

But wait, folks, because Safari 4 is just around the corner, and it will set new performance records, or at least that’s what the rumor sites claim.

What’s more, Apple has gotten lambasted by Mozilla and some elements of the tech press for its overly aggressive scheme to make Windows users download Safari. In case you haven’t used Windows lately, the download offer comes in the Software Update application, which periodically appears if your XP or Vista installation includes QuickTime and/or iTunes and a new version is available. Only thing is that Safari is already checked, with the assumption that most people will simply take the download.

No, I’m not getting into the argument about whether Safari is less safe than the other browsers because it doesn’t have phishing protection built-in. Anyone who just avoids clicking links in suspicious email messages that purport to come from one of your financial institutions (and I suppose some of you are lucky to have more than one) shouldn’t have anything to worry about.

Tuesday, however, was Mozilla’s day to shine, hoping to enter the Guinness Book of World Records with the largest number of file downloads in a single day. I wish them luck, and I can assure you that my download was part of that number, although getting to Mozilla’s site during the early hours was a chore, since it was so overloaded.

In the end, in fact, over a million copies were downloaded during the first four hours, despite chronic server overload issues.

To be sure, Firefox 3 has one huge advantage over its predecessor, and that’s a look and feel that is supposedly more native to the various platforms it supports. So the Mac version is, more or less, more Mac-like, and the Windows version adapts to the Windows conventions, such as they are, more precisely.

On the Mac, for example, Mozilla boasts that: “the new Firefox theme makes toolbars, icons, and other user interface elements look like a native OS X application. Firefox also uses OS X widgets and supports Growl for notifications of completed downloads and available updates. A combined back and forward control make it even easier to move between Web pages.”

Unfortunately, Mozilla’s efforts on the Mac, while mostly successful, miss the boat in handling Print dialogs. It doesn’t support the standard Leopard motif, which includes a Preview feature, and combines the functions of Page Setup in a single dialog. That’s unfortunate.

Worse, when you print a page in Firefox, there’s no progress dialog to indicate pages are being passed off to the printer. You don’t know you’re successful until your printer icon pops up in the Dock. That, too, is unfortunate.

However, Firefox’s new imaging routines do manage to handle most sites with greater fidelity, and I didn’t run into the spate of blank pages that afflicted previous editions. I realize this improved printing is not listed among the “must have” features, but everyone has their own priorities, and that was one of mine.

The other new features emphasize security and ease-of-use. I am particularly pleased with the enhanced auto complete feature, which delivers a large drop-down menu listing your choices in clear, readable text. Nice.

Overall, Firefox 3 launches a whole lot quicker than prior versions, and is snappier in every usability respect. Pages come up quickly, switching pages back and forth seems almost instantaneous and it comes across as rock stable — or as stable as any browser can be considering the complicated tasks they’re called upon to perform.

In the past, Firefox has been a notorious RAM hog, with memory use sharply increasing over the course of a typical session. I used the marvelous iStat Pro widget to keep tabs over how Firefox 3 was consuming memory and didn’t find anything to complain about.

In the scheme of things, does all this really matter? You see, just about any recent browser available for your Mac can handle most mundane chores without trouble. You should be able to visit all or most of the sites you frequent, including the ones on which you handle commerce. If a site doesn’t work in one browser, you use another, back and forth.

Thus, my regular routine does include both Firefox and Safari. And both now run pretty much the same on both the Mac and Windows platforms, and Firefox also has a Linux version.

But if you’re not a power user, will any of the new features make all that much of a difference? The answer is probably no. In saying that, though, installing Firefox 3 on your Mac is a simple drag and drop affair. Just make sure you quit the previous version first, and replace it. When you launch the new version, it’ll pick up all your settings, including your bookmarks.

And for the Windows users in our audience (and there are many, by the way): Firefox 3 is a wonderful way to continue to strike a blow against Microsoft’s endless mediocrity. The new version offers more than enough meat and potatoes to keep you happy, that’s for sure.

I remember when the first PowerPC-based Mac came out in 1994. Despite the promise of greatly-increased performance, my initial encounter was a huge let-down, mostly because there wasn’t a lot of software supporting the new processor. So just about everything, including large portions of the Mac OS, ran in 68K emulation, where performance was reduced by two processor generations, so to speak.

That meant that you’d get performance in line with a 68030 Motorola processor, the one that preceded the 68040 that appeared in the Centris and Quadra series prior to the PowerPC’s introduction.

It took several years before emulation became faster than the real thing, and most software was coded to run native on the new chips. It too another dozen years for Apple to cast its lot with Intel.

The first Intel-based Macs appeared in early 2006 (the transition was announced the previous year), and the final stage of the migration, in the form of the Mac Pro, appeared that summer.

Yet it appears that Apple is rushing to put its older hardware out to pasture, if the reported system requirements of Mac OS 10.6, better known as Snow Leopard, are correct. A screenshot purportedly showing installation instructions of the preview edition handed out to developers under confidentiality agreements (which some, alas, don’t bother to obey) specifies Intel only.

Now to be fair to PowerPC users, who haven’t put up their petitions of protest so far — at least none that I know about — Snow Leopard won’t have a lot in the way of spiffy new features. Yes, there will be native support for Microsoft Exchange 2007. But if you can live without that, consider that most of the enhancements are most effective on Intel-based models, particularly better support for Macs with multicore processors. In addition, more of the processing chores will be offloaded to the graphics chip, which will also help make your Mac run much faster.

Apple is also promising to reduce Snow Leopard’s disk space footprint. The fastest route to that is simply to remove a large portion of the code, which can be easily accomplished by ending support for the G4 and the G5. I suppose Apple is also going to look for other ways to remove the bloat, but certainly supporting fewer models is apparently job one.

If you own a PowerPC, though, be patient. It’s not as if you have to choose between feeding your car’s diet of high-priced fuel just yet. Leopard will continue to receive regular maintenance and security updates, and Snow Leopard is still “about” a year away. it could even take longer, perhaps as late as Macworld 2010, which would make those PowerPC-based Macs nearly four years old at best, and that’s as good a time as any to consider an upgrade to a newer, speedier model regardless of the state of affairs.

Even if Mac OS 10.6 gets here earlier, I doubt that Apple is going to confer end of life status on 10.5, not with a user base in the tens of millions, many of whom will have no more operating system upgrade options.

In fact, until 10.7 comes around, it is quite possible that both Leopard and Snow Leopard will continue to coexist, and the next reference operating system upgrade will probably come late in 2010, if then. Just how far back should Apple retain support?

As to software publishers, there’s no incentive for most of them to stop building Universal applications. If Apple is to be believed, a developer doesn’t have to do a tremendous amount of work to support two processor platforms, although I can imagine that testing and optimization will still be fairly substantial portions of their workload.

However, publishers will eventually find reasons to abandon Universal, claiming, perhaps, that they can deliver better applications quicker if they code strictly for Intel. Adobe has already begun to do this sort of thing with some of their stuff, such as the new Mac version of Premiere, their video editing application. But Adobe apparently also uses its own development tools, so they may find it easier or at least more convenient not to have to support PowerPC with some of their newest products.

However, most of Adobe’s Creative Suite, which has a long history on the PowerPC, won’t abandon that chipset any time soon. I expect the same holds true for a fairly large number of products out there. The lone exception is games, where you’re lucky to get a Mac version, so if it must be Intel-only, that’s the way it is.

Before you blame Apple for being too quick on the trigger, take a long look at the other side of the tracks. Windows Vista is a notorious memory and processor hog. If your PC is more than a year or two old, you may be able to install Vista, but your computer’s former performance level will drop considerably. This is one large reason why Vista didn’t do so well when it comes to upgrade sales. The vast, vast majority of those tens of millions of sales that Microsoft rings up are due to OEM licenses to PC makers, who loaded it on their new hardware.

Even then, far too many Windows users are asking the manufacturers to downgrade them to XP, and they continue to beg Microsoft to keep the other OS on sale.

I suppose I should feel sorry for some of you who just don’t have enough money now to consider buying a new Mac. But that’s a decision you don’t have to make just yet if you have other priorities. When the time does arrive, maybe Apple will continue to have some highly affordable options that won’t break your budget, perhaps in the form of the Mac mini or a hoped-for successor.

Meantime, hold the petitions. When it comes to Apple, they won’t change a thing.