Before I get started with this commentary, let me assure you that I never take any of my predictions seriously. Yet it seems as if The Night Owl caught a wave with one particular article, and now other sites, including the standard rumor sources, are getting into the act.

So what am I talking about?

Well, on the heels of my admittedly casual prediction, recently, that we might learn preliminary details of Mac OS 10.6 at the WWDC next week, comes a claim that it will not support Macs with PowerPC chips.

Let’s, for the moment, consider the impact of this is true. You see, Intel-based Macs only went on sale in 2006, and the last conversions took place that summer, with the release of the Mac Pro. So if this particular rumor is to be taken seriously, and 10.6 appears some time next year, Apple would abandon support for many Macs that are barely more than three years old. That is certainly not in keeping with their previous approach on dealing with legacy hardware.

From Apple’s standpoint, this move could make a whole lot of sense, despite the pain they’ll be inflicting on many of you. Being able to strip PowerPC code from the system binaries means that upgrade files will be a whole lot smaller, and that would be a boon for those of you suffering lengthy downloads for the stuff that regularly shows up in your Software Update app. It would also mean simpler quality control testing, since only a single processor architecture need to evaluated for compatibility, resulting in far fewer complications and unexpected bugs.

Such a move would, of course, encourage third-party developers to get with the program and begin to offer more and more of their products as Intel-only, for the very same reasons. It would also make it easier for them to optimize cross-platform code bases, and thus such things as games would work more efficiently on Macs. Then again, a lot of the latter is because those games were originally designed for Microsoft’s DirectX graphics system, and they still have to be ported to OpenGL. Call it half a loaf.

From a practical business standpoint, it’s also true that sales of Intel-based Macs are off the charts, and the user base will be noticeably larger than PowerPC Macs at the end of that possible two-year gap between Leopard and its successor. This may indeed be a factor that’s weighing on the minds of Apple’s development and marketing teams, but you have to wonder whether this might just be far too draconian a measure.

Understand there is no confirmation about Apple’s plans for 10.6, or even if it will be showcased, however briefly, at the forthcoming WWDC. Just because a number of sites are raising that possibility, and the additional prospects that Apple will abandon support for the PowerPC, doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.

You see, I feel that action would be premature, even if 10.6 arrived in 2010. I tend to think that 10.7 would be a better operating system to mark the final nail in the coffin for PowerPC. That would take us to 2011 or 2012, and that would be more than enough time for this to happen.

If I were to venture a guess, I’d tell you I see little reason for 10.6 not to have the very same system requirements as Leopard. That means a G4 with an 867MHz processor or better. That, to me, is a perfectly sensible line of demarcation, because it would allow Macs from the early part of this century to survive to the end of the decade without having to be replaced.

This is not to say you shouldn’t get an Intel-based Mac at the earliest opportunity. Regardless of what Apple does, it’s a sure thing more and more application developers will abandon the Universal code base and embrace Intel-only. Adobe has done that with some of its creative applications already, and there are scattered apps from other companies that have the very same limitation.

Since Microsoft Office 2008 appears to suffer somewhat on a PowerPC, I dare say that Office 2010, or whatever it will be called, will make the full exclusive transition to Intel. That will also ease the process to deliver a restored Visual Basic for Applications, since Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit won’t have to work quite so hard when it only has a single processor platform to support.

Sure, the Universal feature in Apple’s Xcode was supposed to be able to simplify that dual-processor paradigm, but it still means more work optimizing an application’s code base. For a sprawling suite, such as the various Office components, that entaila an awful lot of work, and you can understand if the PowerPC wasn’t given full attention.

Regardless of how this all plays out, going to Intel is not quite as expensive as you might think. Believe it or not, the lowly Mac mini is actually more powerful than any Power Mac, other than the higher-end G5’s, and those with heavy-duty graphic cards. Should Apple accept the suggestion from me, Dan Frakes of Macworld, and Daniel Knight, of LowEndMac, to build a mid-priced “headless” iMac, the upgrade dilemma would be eased considerably.

I know there are still millions upon millions of PowerPC Macs in regular use in homes and businesses. I think Apple would be making a monumental mistake to abandon them too quickly. In fact, I think there would be lots and lots of protests if 10.6 did just that.

But I am still feeling more confident in my prediction about 10.6’s unveiling at WWDC 2008, and that’s at least one positive development — at least for me.

When Apple introduced a free set of Internet services several years ago, dubbed iTools, I jumped at the chance to have a genuine mac.com email address. When it morphed into a $99 commercial service, dubbed .Mac, I’m sure many of the early adopters opted out, and I was quite frankly the fence.

But I still have my membership and will probably renew it for another year, but still I wonder why I should bother, because it doesn’t give me a whole lot of value for the money.

Sure, using .Mac’s sync services works nicely, so my contacts, email accounts and Safari bookmarks are kept uniform between my desktop and note-book Macs. Some of the other applications I use also take advantage of Sync Services to provide a similar level of consistency.

To me, however, the most important element remains that email address. It’s not that I couldn’t live without it, but it serves the useful purpose of providing an external backup address, in case our Web servers go down and take along our email capabilities with it. At least there’s a method to my madness.

On Monday, however, I began to regret that decision. For several hours, .Mac email was partly or completely offline. Sometimes I could retrieve the messages via the Webmail interface; other times even that didn’t work, and the error messages made no sense. At no time did I see any announcements about a service outage, though I readily concede some of you might have.

If this was a one-time occurrence, no problem. Things happen. For example, one of the datacenters at The Planet, a large hosting provider that handles one of our Web servers, had a fire several days ago in one of its huge power systems, knocking thousands of customers offline. No, we weren’t affected, since the server we use is in another one of The Planet’s facilities, but things happen, and you can see where outages may occur.

However, .Mac doesn’t depend on a single server farm in a single location, so you’d think there would be sufficient redundancy to handle the load if one of the datacenters has a problem of one sort or another. Surely, Apple cares if you can’t get the service you paid for over a period of hours on end, but there’s no official Service Level Agreement (SLA) that guarantees you a specific level of uptime, as there would be with a conventional Web host.

In contrast, if you subscribe to one of the paid versions of Google Apps, the SLA is the industry-standard 99.9%, although most of these agreements have sufficient wiggle room to get the service provider off the hook except in the most extreme cases.

However, if Apple wants to expand and improve upon .Mac, reliability has to be job number one. It doesn’t matter what sort of glitzy features they provide if you can’t depend on the service being online when you really need it.

At the same time, Steve Jobs admits that .Mac hasn’t been given the proper level of attention in recent years, which signals, to me at least, that he wants to change things rather drastically.

What sort of changes would that entail? Well, beyond the assurance of industrial-strength reliability, certainly your email and general file storage ought to be increased. I mean, Gmail is free, yet you get over 6GB of storage. If you opt for the paid version of Google Apps, at $50 per year for each user, the storage increases to 25GB, and that’s strictly for your mailbox. Even with the gratis version of Google Apps, there is a calendar, instant messaging client, and a set of productivity apps that are reasonably compatible with Microsoft Office.

So should there be a return to free for Apple? Well, I suppose you’d have to put up with inline ads to pay the bills, just as you do with Gmail’s Web interface (the ads are optional in the paid versions of Google Apps). However, I wonder if Mac users would accept that level of compromise.

But even if Apple wanted to continue to charge you annual fees, $99 is way too much for what’s being offered. Right now, even $49 might be a stretch, but I think the estimated one to two million members would increase manyfold as a result. There really ought to be some enterprise-level features as well, such as push email, along with collaboration features to make .Mac a low-cost alternative to Microsoft Exchange.

Yes, I realize that Exchange support is coming in the next iteration of the iPhone firmware, and that lots of businesses demand it as the condition for buying iPhones in large quantities. Apple made a good business decision there, and certainly Microsoft is doing well too, courtesy of whatever license fees they earn, and the fact that they’ll sell lots of costly Exchange Server licenses too.

It’s also a sure thing that there are many small businesses who don’t want to invest in their own email servers, or pay large fees for hosted Exchange servers elsewhere. Certainly this is ripe territory for Apple to mine if they decide to go after this market.

At the same time, there’s nothing wrong with having the simple Web site builders, online greeting cards, and all the rest of the .Mac goodies for consumers. Indeed, ntegration with iLife and other Mac apps is a good thing, and this double-focus will only help .Mac come into its own.

But, as I said early on, regardless of what Apple does, I just want the thing to work.

All right, I recognize that the title of this article is apt to inspire a number of strange responses. After all, Microsoft is still laughing all the way to the bank, with great profits and rising sales. However, there have been troubling signs for a number of years now, although the forces of inertia just keep them going.

And, no, I do not intent to compare them to the “Energizer Bunny.”

You see, it’s perfectly clear from this vantage point that Microsoft is having more and more difficulty getting people to take them seriously. The Windows Vista rollout was an unmitigated disaster, and you almost feel that they promoted it with half a heart.

Now in the entertainment business, a movie company will keep a known clunker from the critics, boost marketing expenses, and hope that enough people will see it before they begin to talk about how bad it really is.

Microsoft, however, wouldn’t even invest in a large-scale marketing plan to launch Vista. Yes, there were TV ads, and billboards and such, but can you remember them in the way you remembered the Windows 95 rollout that featured The Rolling Stones?

In those days, people lined up to buy the latest and greatest version of Windows. Vista got a collective yawn, even from supposedly known Microsoft fanboys who complained about its sluggish performance and the woeful lack of driver compatibility.

Now Microsoft, after putting out some ridiculous spin that Vista really is a success, despite the ongoing campaigns to keep selling XP a while longer, is taking the wraps off Windows 7.

The known features, such as a touch capability and a Dock-like taskbar, seem to have been so obviously cribbed from Apple that you wonder just what Microsoft was thinking.

On the hardware front, I suppose the Xbox 360 is doing all right, but the Zune is losing what little sales momentum it had. A recent survey from the NPD Group gave them 4% of the music player market, behind SanDisk, which had 11% and Apple’s iPod, at 71%.

Indeed, Microsoft couldn’t even match the sales of the former partners it double-crossed when the Zune was introduced.

Now the Zune isn’t a bad player. In fact, it’s probably fairly decent, but it strikes you as nothing more than an attempt to imitate the iPod of two or three years ago, and tack on a few extra features to convey the illusion that it is really superior.

This is, however, pretty much what Microsoft has done all along. First promise the moon, then deliver something more down to earth with the claim that the next version will be a whole lot better.

Unfortunately, for far too long, the tech press and customers alike believed Microsoft, or they were willing to accept a product that was almost as good, even though the superior version was already on sale from another company — Apple.

When it comes to embracing the cloud, Google gets it, Microsoft doesn’t. In fact, their efforts were so pathetic they actually believed that buying Yahoo would somehow turn things around. What a colossal waste of money! Yes, the effort to make this transaction happen have failed so far, but never say never.

But who is responsible for Microsoft’s also-ran status when it comes to innovation? Well, with BIll Gates essentially gone, you have to place the blame squarely on the shoulders of Steve Ballmer, who easily conveys the impression that he has lost most of his senses.

He can scream, cajole, and boast, but he has no clue about innovation, and it seems to me that most of the members of Microsoft’s senior management simply don’t have the smarts to turn the company around before it begins an inevitable decline.

Beneath the executive levels, I’m certain that Microsoft has thousands of brilliant engineers and marketers who would be able to deliver incredibly compelling products if only given the chance. The question is whether the leadership can prove the leadership they need to harness their creativity, rather than build more overpriced junk.

Surely, after squandering billions of dollars, Microsoft’s management must understand something is wrong in Redmond and that things need to change to keep the ship on course. Large corporations go through ups and downs over the years, and it is certainly possible for the world’s largest software developer to take a new direction and become a true competitor, one that can win in the marketplace, rather than with deception, with bait and switch.

The question is whether Microsoft will wake up and realize something is wrong, or will continue to fiddle while everything around them goes up in flames.

One common definition of a cult is, “a misplaced or excessive admiration for a particular person or thing.” Some might feel that Apple’s customers, particularly the ones that have been around for a decade or two, can be considered a cult.

Now I don’t know that I’m a cult member, although I have used Macs since the 1980s. However, it clearly required a high degree of devotion to the platform to stay with it during the dark days.

At one time, just buying Mac software was difficult. You couldn’t just go online to buy the titles you wanted, and a visit to a local computer store would often be an exercise in frustration. If you found a Mac product at all, the box would be dusty, and it would likely contain an older or even obsolete version. The store clerks would just tell you that there wasn’t much software for Macs, and that, as far as they were concerned, would be that.

Yes, there were exceptions, in the form of real Apple dealers who would sometimes provide a decent selection. If you went to the catalog houses and got a printed booklet listing their inventory, you’d find a rich variety of Mac products, but that took a little time and effort, and I can see where some people just gave up in frustration and returned to DOS.

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