To many of you, the Mac programmers over at Microsoft are the company’s shining stars. Although they labor within the confines of a byzantine bureaucracy and strangely wrong-headed policies, they are not supposed to be drinking the company’s kool-aid. Rather, they’re supposed to be devoted Mac users who have carved out a solid niche where creativity reigns supreme.

Now that may be true to a large extent. I do think that the Mac BU tries really hard to deliver great software, within the serious constraints imposed on them by their employer. On the other hand, this also means that they live with assumptions that may not be entirely realistic.

It is perfectly true that, in developing Office for the Mac, they have a set of contradictory goals. One, of course, is to maintain full or virtually full compatibility with Office for Windows. But, as they learned with the infamous Word 6 in the last decade, you cannot build a Mac application and make it look like you’ve exited Apple’s universe and entered Microsoft’s.

We Mac users are quite demanding of certain constants, on of which, of course, is that a Mac application, for the most part, adhere to the conventions of the platform. In other words, it must be “Mac like,” to use the Microsoft parlance that implies a resemblance but not necessarily a reality.

I am concerned whether they have really considered the implications of that phrase.

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

The best way to observe the state of the so-called computer platform wars today is to look at the ever-popular Mac and PC spots, where two friendly dudes banter about the advantages or otherwise of their chosen operating system.

At the end, you come away with the impression that the personifications of the Mac and PC are nice people that actually like each other and are just trying to find ways to work together. Imagine two brothers with widely different world views trying to come together and act like family.

Indeed, one of the big selling points of the Mac is that it plays nicely with Windows. Microsoft’s Office suites on both platforms can share files, and your Mac can easily network with a PC. After a fashion, there’s even support with Microsoft Exchange servers for corporate email and other group-related functions.

I suppose it all dates back to the 1997 Macworld, where the ghost-like figure of Bill Gates appeared on screen via a satellite feed. There and then, Steve Jobs and Gates declared the platform wars over. Microsoft won, and it’s time to get over it and get on with our lives.

This is not to say that Apple is above ribbing Microsoft from time to time, witness those ads to those ubiquitous signs during WWDC events about copying stuff from Mac OS X.

But you sometimes feel Apple doesn’t really have its heart in it anymore. They have already invaded Microsoft’s turf with QuickTime, the iPod, iTunes and even Safari. Besides, Apple’s sales appear to be climbing steadily, so is there any real incentive to wage out and out warfare with Microsoft when stealth marketing seems to be accomplishing its goals?

Stealth marketing?

Well, consider all the online pundits who claim they used to be Windows users, but extended exposure to the Mac convinced them to change their ways. One by one, they have become Mac users, loyal Mac users, but they always leave a caveat in their articles that there still may be reasons that force you to stick with Windows. But they’re just hedging their bets with no real enthusiasm.

These days, even Microsoft’s best efforts play second fiddle to Apple’s marketing machine. From the introduction to the second-generation Zune music players to last winter’s release of Windows Vista, you get the impression that Microsoft wasn’t even trying anymore. Maybe they are so confident that their dominance of the PC industry will persist until the last personal computer rolls off the assembly lines that they no longer feel it necessary to pull out all the stops.

Certainly you get the impression that Apple continues to believe what Jobs said ten years ago. While the Mac continues to make inroads against Windows, the overall Mac user base is still dwarfed by Windows. Growing sales may help Apple’s bottom line and delight their stockholders, but it won’t change the world.

Then again, maybe Apple doesn’t have to remove its gloves after all.

Watching Microsoft in action, it’s easy to compare the company to an aging boxer, whose best days in the ring are long gone. His legs move slowly, fists don’t have the speed and power they once possessed, and perhaps too many glancing blows have dimmed mental alertness.

This is not to say Microsoft is necessarily punch drunk. But years at the top can certainly make any individual or company overconfident. You think you’ve already conquered the world, and that nobody will ever take your crown away. This may explain why Microsoft is happy to play the waiting game with the xBox and Zune, confident that huge investments in both products will eventually pay off with huge profits.

After all, doesn’t Microsoft own the PC universe?

Besides, although they’ve faced apparent defeats in antitrust actions, they have plenty of money to go around, and they probably chalk up those hundreds of millions of dollars in fines and other expenses simply to the cost of doing business.

At the same time, you wonder what might happen if Apple decided to go for the brass ring. How would Microsoft react then? It’s not as if Apple isn’t there already with the iPod, and some suggest the iPhone is poised to attain total dominance of the feature and smartphone markets.

But the Mac? Just because one in six laptops expected to be sold at the retail level in the U.S. are Macs doesn’t mean Apple has suddenly caught a wave. They still sell but a fraction of the units that are moved by either Dell or HP.

There are also the alleged consequences of lashing out against Microsoft in full force, such as the probable loss of Office for the Mac. Would Redmond really pull the plug on the Mac Business Unit? Some think, by shedding Visual Basic for Applications, Microsoft is already moving in that direction.

It may also be that the steady improvements in iWork are designed to set the stage where Microsoft’s Mac software will no longer be available. True, iWork has a lot of room to grow, but perhaps there are already test versions in the labs that match Office feature-for-feature and then some.

Don’t say it can’t happen, but maybe Apple doesn’t care anymore. Maybe they are happy enough to see Macs make steady inroads against the Microsoft machine. Maybe they just want Microsoft to fade on its own accord, with only a little guidance on their part.

With extremely limited fanfare, Microsoft this week confirmed analyst predictions and introduced the second generation Zune players, which sport basic specs and pricing similar to the iPod.

Now when Apple introduces a new product these days, except for minor revisions to existing models, such as Macs, there’s a huge amount of anticipation that may go on for weeks or months before the truth is actually revealed. Apple seldom does more than send the press an invitation about a week in advance about a special event, with broad hints as to what it’s about. That action turns growing anticipation into fevered demand.

Sure, Microsoft certainly has enough cash in its bank account to fund any marketing campaign it wants, and to hire the best people on the planet to manage it. They can also bring the top ad agencies in the business into play to devise a properly enticing stream of broadcast, online and print ads to accompany the new product’s presence in the marketplace.

Instead, we have Bill Gates delivering the lame excuse that the new Zune is the best they could come up with after six months of work, and that things will only get better next year. You’d think, after all these years on the front lines, he would have learned something.

Now, even if you were tempted to buy a Zune this time instead of an iPod, how are you supposed to react to such an absurdly foolish statement? Would you buy one of those players anyway, knowing it’s really not all that great and that something much better is in the wings, or will you wait till next year?

Or just go back to something that’s reliable, predictable, and usually just works, which means another iPod?

True, the latest iPods may indeed be the best Apple could do to meet its development schedule, but Steve Jobs will nonetheless tout it as the greatest music player ever conceived by man. Could aliens from another star system do better? Sure, but Jobs will never admit that.

You see, Jobs and crew understand what proper salesmanship really means, and that is to put your best foot forward. The product you’re selling is never a compromise dictated by the limitations of the technology and the time and funding you allocated to create it. No, it has to be the best of the breed. You have to feel excited about it, not bored to death.

If a company’s leadership can’t at least act enthusiastic about their work, how do they expect customers to react? How come Microsoft hasn’t figured this out yet?

I’m not saying that the Zune is a bad music player, or that it isn’t worth the purchase price. Indeed, based on the reviews of the original model and the promises made for the revision, it seems pretty decent in the scheme of things. One sensible improvement is removing the three-day time limit on media squirted to a Zune, so you can listen at a later time. Sure, there’s still that silly three-play limit, but at least the file won’t self-destruct prematurely. Being able to sync your Zune wirelessly is also a positive development.

However, the upgraded Zune’s look and general feel, at least based on early descriptions and photos, smack too much of a blatant iPod imitation. During all those antitrust skirmishes in the U.S. and Europe, didn’t Microsoft loudly proclaim that it wanted to be left free to innovate?

So, other than the expanded Wi-Fi capability, do you see any signs of innovation in the Zune, or is it just more imitation? Sure, Microsoft got away with that with Windows, delivering an operating system that is good enough, but not great, largely imitating what has gone before, mostly by a certain company headquartered in Cupertino, California. But the iPod has already run away with the market, which increases the pressure on Microsoft to excel, if it can.

Once again, Microsoft’s key business plan with the Zune — as with the Xbox — is persistence. If they keep it going long enough, even if they have to suffer billions of dollars of losses along the way, they somehow believe that the public will come around and embrace second-rate rather than something that’s really innovative.

Now it may well be that Microsoft can make the Zune into a silk purse from a sow’s ear, but it will require clever marketing, and lots and lots of advertising to convince people that it’s really better than the iPod.

That is something not so easily accomplished. If Microsoft had delivered the Zune six years ago, before the iPod became a cross-platform sensation, they might have had a chance to gain serious traction in this market segment. It still wouldn’t hurt to build a Mac-compatible music store, and invade Apple’s own turf. Perhaps they’d rather have us believe that the Mac platform isn’t large enough to garner serious attention, but with sales of new Macs increasing rapidly, that’s a foolish decision.

While Microsoft has had no compunctions about using hard-edge and sometimes deceptive marketing tactics to expand its dominance in operating systems and office software suites, why do they seem so timid about the Zune? Do they fear more antitrust attention, or maybe the company’s executives no longer have that “fire in the belly” that spurs people on to do the impossible?

It’s a well-known fact that no PC hardware or software maker will survive if you stop buying new versions of their products. While there will always be new customers, a company wants to extract as much cash as possible from the ones that have already purchased their stuff.

Of course, this applies to all businesses building retail products of one sort or another. But there’s a distinct difference, and you can see it if you have an old TV set that’s still in service, such as the 15-year-old 27-inch Sony that remains in my son’s bedroom, even though Grayson is an adult and doesn’t spend the night there very often. The set still functions perfectly. Even though the analog TV signals will disappear from the airwaves in the U.S. in February of 2009, that set will continue to fuction, because it’s hooked up to a digital cable TV converter box.

In passing, your analog TV will work too. If you don’t have cable or satellite, the government will give you two “grants” worth $40 towards the purchase of a digital set top box that will convert the TV signals so they can be received on those old TV sets. The frequency spectrum itself is in the process of being auctioned off, for which the government hopes to exact billions of dollars of income.

Of course, your old car will run, too, although there may be issues with lead-free fuel that could, potentially at least, damage some engines.

Now when it comes to a vintage personal computer, you can throw most considerations of compatibility out the window. Even something a mere ten years old won’t run any of today’s software, even if it could, for example, boot a recent version of Windows. Forget about Mac OS X, which abandons most Macs built more than five or six years ago, although a shareware program, XPostFacto, will induce some of those old boxes to work after a fashion.

Indeed, as I write this, it is widely expected that Mac OS 10.5 Leopard will also dump a generation of older Macs, the G3, entirely, and might even have problems with some less-powerful G4 models.

Windows Vista has difficulty running with all features intact on all but the most powerful PCs if they have been around more than a year or two.

A similar situation applies to most modern software. Even a word processor, which is surely not terribly CPU-intensive, might have extraordinary system requirements even for basic functionality. Does it really require a supercomputer to process text?

Take Word 2004, considered one of the best versions of Microsoft’s dominant word processor. Compare it to the legendary Word 5.1, which offered lots of sensible features (except for text zooming) and ran with great performance on some of the slowest Macs available in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Is there something about the basic word processing engine in the current version of Word, and the one under development now, that somehow overpowers all Macs less than five years old?

Consider the level of computing power that, for example, took man to the moon, and don’t you wonder why it requires hundreds of times that capability to change text from regular to bold, or to move a paragraph from one location in a document to another?

To be sure, it’s a well-known fact that software somehow grows in complexity and sheer bloat as CPU horsepower increases. You sometimes wonder of the various manufacturers aren’t in cahoots with each other to force you to buy brand new computers and upgrade to the applications that require them. Or is it the other way around?

Years ago, I read an article in the late, lamented Byte magazine urging programmers to refine and streamline their computer code, to minimize this vicious cycle. This isn’t to say that customers don’t want more features, and faster performance. While formatting and manipulating words is no big deal, being able to render 3D objects in all sorts of sophisticated ways can tax the power of the speediest personal computers on the planet.

Indeed, there is something to be said about making your computers do more of your work for you, and your wish lists certainly include adding more and more powerful features for your favorite applications.

However, knowing your computer has a short lifetime and that there’s always something faster on the horizon has probably made programmers complacent. They realize that if today’s Macs and PCs won’t run their products with acceptable performance, tomorrow’s will. Sure, if you complain loud enough, they might just revise the product to speed it up here and there, so it seems snappier. But, under-the-hood, it probably hasn’t changed all that much.

But wouldn’t it be nice if the software companies made a little more effort to streamline their code, so simple maintenance updates don’t take hours and hours to download on all but the fastest broadband connections? Wouldn’t it be nice if they paid more attention to the sources of performance bottlenecks, so these applications didn’t hog resources?

Now I suppose there are folks who use Linux who will remind me that their chosen operating system does indeed work efficiently on slower hardware. I won’t dispute that contention, but I’m strictly looking at the mainstream desktop operating systems here.

We can certainly blame Microsoft for its failings, deservingly so. But let’s not let Apple off the hook. Take a look at the latest iLife ’08, Apple’s newest consumer digital lifestyle suite. The much-maligned iMovie, which is, as you no doubt recall, a hobbyist application designed for casual movie editing, requires, “a Mac with an Intel processor, a Power Mac G5 (dual 2.0GHz or faster), or an iMac G5 (1.9GHz or faster.”

Unbelievable. Do they expect everyone to go out and buy a new Mac simply to run iMovie?

And so it goes, onward and upward, with no end in sight.