You just know that, in the 1980s, several Mac applications set the standard for the industry for decades to come. How soon we forget that Adobe PageMaker made it possible to do typography and layout on a personal computer — your Mac of course. Combine that with Apple’s LaserWriter and Adobe’s PostScript, and you were able to output essentially what you saw on your monitor.

Between my two radio careers (broadcast and online), I worked in traditional typesetting, and these developments basically put most of the companies I worked for out of work — if they failed to adapt of course. And I imagine a lot fewer layout tables and hot wax machines were sold as well.

Certainly musicians found ways to use a relatively low-cost personal computer to perform the same chores that would formerly require expensive studios to accomplish, and photo retouchers no longer had to take tiny brushes and remove blemishes and red eyes from photo negatives as Adobe Photoshop brought those tasks to the digital realm as well.

Today, some of the names of the programs, other than Photoshop of course, have changed, and they can do more things in a speedier fashion on the supercomputer you have on your desktop or on your lap. But as I perform my daily chores here, I wonder how much has really changed. Sure, my workflow is more attuned to audio editing and blogging than writing books and magazine articles, but the way I approach these tasks is remarkably similar.

Web browsing? The standard was set in the 1980s. It’s faster, the sites are much prettier, but you still have back and forwards buttons, along with the ever-present refresh feature and some way to empty the cache when sites crash your browser.

Email is another type of application that doesn’t seem to have changed all that much from the basic spreadsheet look that divides messages into columns allowing you to sort the contents in simple ways, such as by name, when it was received and so forth and so on.

Sure, there are more ways to organize your messages, and surely Apple’s Smart Folders is a neat trick, but you still have to perform a fair amount of manual labor, such as initiating the proper search routine to get the folder you want to perform precisely the functions you require.

This isn’t to say developers aren’t searching for better ways to help you get your work done Take email, since it is probably the single most important application used by the largest number of people on a personal computer, or a smartphone. Just recently the Outspring, the descendant of the company who brought you QuickMail a long time ago, announced Outspring Mail, which may be the first iteration of an application that revolutionizes the way you access and organize your messages.

The promotional literature, for example, states that: “Outspring Mail ushers in an entirely new category of software to the Macintosh: adaptive intelligent software. By using advanced database analysis and Bayesian logic, the program is able to ascertain patterns in the way you reply to and file your mail and make suggestions to assist you with your communications.”

Now I should tell you that Outspring Mail, typical of a version one release, has some performance issues and feature shortcomings. It’s not quite a fully-realized product yet, but it appears to have huge potential, should these capabilities mature as promised.

What is most intriguing here is the fact that, at long last, a software company has made some effort to rethink the traditional email metaphor and attempt to observe your work pattern in order to handle your messages in a way that anticipates your needs.

Certainly this is one of the things that is lacking in the way Mac and Windows applications are developed now. As computers have become more and more powerful, applications have simply become larger, with more and more often useless features to compensate. Software bloat is everywhere, and when it takes 20 seconds to launch a simple word processing application on the speediest Mac on the planet, you just know that something has to give.

Now is this something that Apple ought to be doing? Well, in part, because it has a healthy selection of applications, and indeed it may have to build tools into the operating system to allow those features to exist.

Today? Well, with over 300 new features in Leopard, take a look at Mac System 1.0 back in 1984, and see how much, aside from the surface glitz, has really changed. You still interact with a Mac with mouse and keyboard. Even the revolutionary iPhone simply puts these functions onto a touch screen, but the basic functionality is little changed.

It may well be that there are, even now, small startup companies that are preparing to take the personal computing environment into the 21st century at long last. Maybe there are teams at Apple that are even now exploring some incredibly original capabilities that can be grafted into Leopard’s successor.

It couldn’t come soon enough.

What can you say about a company that was, on a number of occasions, given up for dead or an eternal existence of irrelevance, but has come back big time? Well certainly, when it comes to Apple Inc., there’s always plenty of room for legitimate criticism.

In fact, devoted Mac users are ready and willing to rag on the company for real or imagined slights, software defects, hardware defects, or what they perceive to be bad corporate decisions. Just check the comments on any self-respecting Mac Web site and even Apple’s own support forums and you’ll see what I mean.

With a lot of things to call Apple to task about, it remains unfortunate that you read so many false claims that really serve to muddy the waters, and make it hard to find the truth.

On Tuesday morning, for example, Mrs. Steinberg pointed me to an announcement of an upcoming story on Fox News about someone hacking an Apple note-book. Although this seemed to be a new report, I’m sure the basics sound familiar to you. Indeed, its turned out to be a belated retelling of that apparently successful attempt to hack a MacBook Air last week, the one that netted a security researcher $10,000 for his alleged two minutes of work.

Since you’ve already read my comments about that stunt, I don’t need to repeat them here, except that it will surely be used as ammunition once again to advance the claim that Apple is fast becoming as vulnerable to malware as the Windows platform and that the dreaded infection is almost upon us. Probably as close as the bird flu, right?

Well, they’ve been saying that every single time someone has produced a proof of concept virus in a lab, or, in the wake of Apple’s periodic Mac OS X security updates. It’s coming, but as the boy who cried wolf, it never seems to arrive.

This isn’t to say that there won’t be an exploit that will spread across the Mac platform some day. But if it happens, it won’t be done because someone wants bragging rights. Today, malware is a source of profit, a way to take control of personal computers and use them to form botnets to spread spam, spyware and other nasty stuff in order to enrich to Internet criminals.

At the same time, it’s also true that Windows Vista is evidently more resilient to infection too, but with hundreds of millions of PCs out there using older and far more vulnerable Microsoft operating systems that are easily infected, where’s the incentive to switch to Macs?

Is the rapid growth of Apple going to change things? Not so far. I mean how much money has been lost as a result of a Mac OS X virus? Then again, where’s the multi-billion dollar class-action lawsuit against Microsoft for ignoring security for so long and selling customers hundreds of millions of copies of insecure operating systems and application software? How much have consumers and businesses lost as a result? How many companies have gone out of business because the money spent to cover PC security measures and clean up virus infections meant the difference between profit and loss?

Shouldn’t the biggest ambulance chasing legal firms be hard at work even now to earn millions of dollars of fees from appropriately-filed lawsuits? I wonder.

Of course, it’s not just fear merchants on the other side of the fence spreading misleading information about Apple. Alas, some of the people you expect to be Mac loyalists are doing the very same thing, and that’s highly unfortunate.

At one time, for example, I was a huge booster of the MacFixIt site, because it contained loads of all-important troubleshooting information to help you make your Mac run as reliably as possible.

Since they were acquired by CNET, however, the quality of their work has gone downhill fast. Instead of actually checking facts, and working with people who report problems, it seems they take a handful of anomalous reports and use them as evidence of major problems with Apple’s latest and greatest.

In fact, just about every single Apple release in recent memory has been fodder for this sort of irresponsible treatment. What it seems to mean is that every single product Apple has released is fatally flawed, and that you should probably turn of your Macs and hide in a cave, lest it chase you down and beat you to death.

Let’s get serious: Yes, software has bugs. Yes, it’s impossible to deliver products that are 100% trouble free. Indeed, there is no possible way for a company’s Q&A department to test for every possible installation scenario and make sure everything works reliably.

In all fairness to MacFixIt, yes, they sometimes get it right. For example, a recent Apple Security Update was revised to address, among other issues, a conflict with Apple’s Aperture photo editing application. This was correctly reported by MacFixIt.

But alleged problems with Safari 3.1, for example, sound downright eccentric. This isn’t to say that all of these reports are made up of whole cloth. No doubt there are some who have encountered difficulties, but rather than recommend the draconian solution of downgrading to Safari 3.0.4 by using a third-party hack to find a lone application installer in an Apple System DVD, they ought to help the affected users see if something else might be causing their grief. Whatever happened to simply emptying the Web cache, deleting a preference file, or ditching third-party system add-ons?

Indeed, some of Apple’s worst enemies may be the very people who claim to be their friends.

I realize that there are a whole lot of subjective factors that go into choosing which personal computer to buy, and, also, which computing platform to use. Sometimes you’re forced into it, such as using Windows in an office environment that’s standardized on the platform and requires applications that are exclusive to that operating system. No doubt that are people who are required to use Macs, but have other priorities.

So, on the surface, I wasn’t surprised to read an article in InfoWorld entitled “Five reasons to ditch the Mac and return to PCs,” which details the sad tale of one Timothy Keanini, chief technology officer of nCircle, who, or so the story says, “loves Macs.”

Now, as I said, I’m not one to attack someone’s taste, even if I don’t agree with their preferences. But when someone is a CIO for a company, you’d think they would use a modicum of logic before coming to so drastic a conclusion as to abandon a particular brand of personal computer.

So why did Keanini give up on Macs?

Reason Number One: He casts aspersions about the alleged difficulty of integrating Macs into his network and having to engineer “workarounds” for efficient workflow. Alas, we don’t know precisely what problems he encountered, at least not yet, or whether using Boot Camp or a virtual machine, such as Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion, would have addressed these problems. Maybe there were better ideas, but we don’t know because the article doesn’t tell us, but we soon learn about those “workarounds.”

Reason Number Two: This one is doubly suspicious. It seems they had troubles converting documents to Microsoft Office and syncing Exchange calendars. Since Office 2007 for Windows and Office 2008 are file compatible, just where did Keanini get the idea there would be file conversion issues? Oh yes, they used Keynote, one of the applications from iWork, and it wouldn’t convert properly to PowerPoint. If that was the biggest problem, why not use the Mac version of Office in the first place? Indeed Entourage 2008 offers pretty decent compatibility with Exchange, so it appears the integration problem here was the fault of Keanini and crew for not deploying Microsoft Office on both platforms.

Reason Number Three: There’s no Microsoft One Note equivalent on the Mac. All right this isn’t even worth arguing about. It’s just too pathetic.

Reason Number Four: Referring to some sort of “Hotel California” syndrome, Keanini rants again about the problems converting documents from one platform to another. This sounds like a repetition of reason number two, and the answer is the same. Why didn’t he think of using Office on the Mac for maximum compatibility? Maybe only his hairdresser knows for sure, because his explanation is non-existent.

Reason Number Five: This one may have a modicum of truth attached to it. Seems their MacBook Pros ran hot, at least in contrast to a Lenovo ThinkPad. Perhaps, but Apple issued several SMC releases to optimize fan performance on their Intel-based note-books, which reduced heat generation for most of you. Frankly, I don’t regard my MacBook Pro, a first-generation model, as particularly hot, but I’ll grant, without actually testing one, that the ThinkPad may indeed run cooler. But since Keanini seems oblivious to the existence of Microsoft Office on the Mac, perhaps his perceptions about heat generation issues are equally suspect. The other thing that occurs to me: Were these ThinkPads newer models, older ones, with comparable specs?

In the end, there really aren’t five reasons involved in this decision. There are three, the most important of which would have most likely been resolved simply by purchasing Office for the Mac. I can’t account for Keanini’s perceptions about excessive heat generation, not having a comparable Lenovo note-book to try. Maybe he never got around to updating his Mac note-books, for the same reason that he was evidently unaware that there is such a thing as the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft and the products that highly-profitable division builds.

In a way, this is a sad story. We have a person who is the CIO of a company who lives in a world of ignorance, and thus reaches a decision that, in the end, strikes me as particularly ill-advised. Maybe he should examine the published reports of productivity between Macs and Windows PCs and see just how his company would fare had he done the Mac switch in a proper fashion.

This isn’t to say that dumping PCs and going wholesale to Macs is necessarily a simple process. Even though the Mac supposedly “just works,” there is a learning curve involved when moving from Windows to Mac OS X. Some features, such as the monolithic menu bar on the Mac, might confuse the Windows user for a time. However, since most applications available on both platforms work pretty much the same, it shouldn’t take more than a few days to become accustomed to the Mac OS.

Indeed, there might also be some issues involved in networking with Windows servers too, but proper planning ought to make this a fairly straightforward process.

My conclusion: If I was looking for a CIO to manage a large computer network, it would certainly not be Timothy Keanini, since his presence in IT management is, unfortunately, a terrific argument for outsourcing.

It wasn’t so long ago that Microsoft had a fearsome presence in the PC industry. If you got on their bad side for any reason, were viewed as a potentially serious competitor, or some combination of both, you had to prepare for them to trounce you. Certainly Netscape felt their wrath, as did companies that tried to push alternatives to the MS-DOS operating system way back when.

However, a read of the filings involved in a certain class action lawsuit against the Windows Vista marketing scheme presents the picture of a company forced to kowtow to Intel and other partners in order to create the false impression of Vista readiness.

A full summary of the sad tale is described in an excellent piece over at the Ars Technica site.

In short, Intel didn’t want to see the market for its 915 chipset — extremely underpowered as far as full Vista compatibility was concerned — to dry up. Such dealers as Best Buy didn’t want to see PC sales for the holiday season in 2006 tank as folks awaited newer, more powerful models that could handle Vista’s exorbitant system requirements with aplomb. So Microsoft, evidently with some reluctance, went along with a dual compatibility rating that largely confused customers who bought computers that couldn’t deliver the full Vista experience.

Does this sound like an all-powerful company that can enforce its dictates through force of will and shady marketing tactics? That may have worked at one time, but no more. Today, while earnings have remained good, MIcrosoft’s stock price remains relatively flat, particularly when you compare it to Apple and Google.

Recent surveys show that Windows Vista gets poor marks for customer satisfaction, both in the consumer and business markets. Microsoft’s name no longer has the prestige it used to carry, at least according to recent surveys.

Without going into excessive detail, it’s clear to me that Microsoft’s fearsome image is severely tarnished. When you extend past their core competency in desktop operating systems and applications, they don’t do so well. The ill-conceived attempt to bear hug Yahoo strikes me more as a move of desperation than a carefully-conceived plan to gain traction in the online marketplace. Surely Microsoft could have spent far less addressing the shortcomings of its own efforts to compete. After all, Google started with nothing. But then again, so did Microsoft, but that was long ago and far, far away.

Unfortunately, while it seems to make for good headlines to write lurid headlines about apparently successful attempts to find security failings in Mac OS X, or possible unsold iPhones (when they are actually in short supply in many of the usual outlets), Microsoft’s failings don’t seem important.

Consider the fact that over a billion dollars was allocated to repair an estimated 12 million defective Xbox 360s, which amounts to roughly the entire production run as of that time. Why? Because of severe overheating problems that would require replacing the consoles. If something similar happened to Apple on even a fraction of that scale, you’d see the headlines plastered on the front pages of the mainstream press around the world.

In other words, Microsoft can make mistakes, deliver faulty products, but just go on laughing to the bank with large profits on their remaining successful products. Apple? The slightest mistake will get them into a jam.

Please understand I’m making no attempt to be objective here, as such a thing is impossible for any journalist. But since I do use Windows from time to time, I’ll try to fairly represent what’s really going on.

First and foremost, Windows Vista is widely acknowledged as a huge let-down. Maybe not an abject failure, as tens of millions of copies have been preloaded onto new PCs, but with a major petition begging Microsoft to extend the lifetime of XP, you can bet a lot of people don’t want the upgrade.

Where’s the petition for Apple to continue to support Tiger, or allow you to downgrade even on the latest models? That’s not a question that’s being asked — although I’m sure a few downgraded because of Leopard’s known version point-zero defects that haven’t been fixed as of 10.5.2.

Whenever Microsoft moves beyond its software business, trouble arises. Assuming that the Xbox 360 woes have been resolved, there’s the failure of the Zune, which ended up being largely a clone of an older iPod, rather than represent a new and better way to carry your music.

Relying on products that are just good enough, rather than innovate as they claim to do, will ultimately hurt Microsoft big time.

This doesn’t mean Microsoft can’t come back. As a new generation of management begins to take over — except for the often irrational-sounding Steve Ballmer of course — it’s quite possible the company will begin to change direction and learn from its mistakes in the years to come. Companies routinely go through ups and downs, and surely Apple is a prime example.