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.

Related Articles

• A Fast Look at the Apple Hardware Upgrade Equation
• The iMac Report: Apple Left the Proprietary World a Decade Ago
• Is a Home-Built Mac a Waste of Time?
• Apple Needs to Open Up!
• Newsletter #440 Preview: The Mac Versus PC Hardware Wars Continue

If you take those published reports at face value, the vaunted security of the Mac OS is just an illusion. During the annual Pwn2Own hacking contest this past week, someone easily exploited a supposedly unknown vulnerability in Apple’s Safari on a MacBook Air within a mere two minutes, earning a ten thousand dollar paycheck for his efforts.

Now, because of a nondisclosure agreement, we don’t know just what vulnerability was present in Safari that was handled so easily, but it sounds to me like a put up job. If you believe the claim, the security flaw was so blatant that it was easily discovered, and that’s extremely unlikely.

Consider that, on the first day of the contest, nobody could attack any of the test computers, running the Mac OS, Windows Vista, and Ubuntu Linux, remotely. Thus the original $20,000 prize went unclaimed. On day number two, the terms were relaxed, so the participants could actually work directly on the computers to locate and exploit possible vulnerabilities.

Now that severely lessens the seriousness of the flaws, because it means that you are granted direct access to the computer you’re going to infect. That severely lessens the danger. No direct access, no exploit, at least under the terms of this contest.

Although he’s not talking, I really doubt that security researcher Charlie Miller had a sudden flash of inspiration from upon high to access a hostile site in Safari and win his ten grand. No way could that possibly happen in a mere two minutes except by a divine or paranormal event. Instead, it’s clear to me that he had previously investigated possible flaws in Mac OS X and had discovered a security leak he could exploit on the spot when the time arrived.

So call it a good sense of timing.

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

Related Articles

• The iMac Report: Apple Left the Proprietary World a Decade Ago
• Newsletter #439 Preview: Apple Goes Up, Microsoft Goes Down
• The Apple Security Report: Safari Needs Better Protection!
• The Mac Clone Controversy Rears Its Ugly Head
• The Leopard Report: Slower than Windows XP?

I suppose we ought to pity those who have been around the tech universe for a long, long time, such as yours truly. I mean, some of the things we accepted as state-of-the-art in those days, such as 800K floppy disks and 100MB hard drives, seem downright primitive today. Please don’t get me started about using tape drive for basic data storage, as opposed to backups.

And didn’t Bill Gates once say you’d never need more than 640K of RAM on your PC? In those days, when I got my first Mac with 8MB RAM, I thought I was in memory heaven. That was until System 7 came along, and I realized the system could take up to half that amount, and leave me a lot less for running real applications.

Well, certainly you don’t to return to those thrilling days of yesteryear. After all, personal computing has come an awful long way since then, and just having Macs running real Unix under the guise of Mac OS X has provided a huge dose of stability and security.

So I suppose I wasn’t surprised to get a comment from a reader about whether it makes sense to bring back Classic Mac OS features. The reader gave an emphatic no, as if anything that’s old is necessarily bad and all good ideas must be new.

Now I can understand that point of view, as someone who always lusts after the latest and greatest, assuming I can afford it of course. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean that some really useful ideas haven’t been tossed away in the quest for something with a more recent creation date.

Take the Location Manager that I mentioned in yesterday’s commentary. Yes, I think that, in some respects, it was better in Mac OS 9, because it was more full-featured. Today it may be somewhat more seamless, but it’s also relatively simple-minded.

When I referred to improvements in the Open/Save dialogs, I mentioned Default Folder X, which is actually just giving you many features that it had in its Classic version, plus some more wrinkles to take advantage of the latest Leopard eye-candy, such as QuickLook. Indeed, when you look at this utility and Boomerang, that venerable dialog box enhancer of the 1980s and 1990s, you’ll see useful and time-saving features that today’s Apple has yet to grok.

That is really unfortunate, because there’s so much Apple can do to enhance your user experience without inventing anything really innovative. Just take what has gone before, give it a fresh coat of paint and see how it flies.

Another lost feature is the extensible Apple menu. Why must you depend on a third-party system enhancement such as Fruit Menu to allow you to add the items you want? Again, this is a throwback to a previous-generation of the Mac OS, yet it worked just fine. Why did Apple have to abandon it? It’s not as if they can’t write the code in a reasonably quick fashion, or that it can’t be done natively in Mac OS X. I suspect if they put a pair of software engineers to the task, they’d come up with a useful, fully functional and appropriately flashy Apple menu alternative in a matter of days.

Of course there’s a problem with some of the system enhancements that restore Classic Mac features, or perform other miracles in the Mac OS X environment. If Apple isn’t providing official system hooks to add those features, they have to do a little magic — sometimes a little mischief — and do a few tricks that aren’t really supported. As a result, whenever Apple releases a major system upgrade, the utilities become incompatible. Worst, if they’re still installed, they might seriously impair the stability of the new system, so you have to remember which ones you installed and make sure they’re removed before upgrading.

Even then, you may hold off reinstalling your system toys until you know for certain they will operate without difficulty in Apple’s new Mac OS X release. That, of course, is by no means certain, so you have to check the publisher of the utility, or your favorite (and we hope reliable) Mac troubleshooting site for a confirmation that it’s safe to restore.

Naturally, I don’t want to put independent developers out of business. While some do it as a hobby, others develop software to earn their way through college, or even feed their families. With such a difficult economy, you don’t want them to lose their sources of income.

At the same time, Apple needs to pay heed to what people use to dress up their Macs, and see if making them core system functions is a better idea. Sometimes it might be, sometimes not. But certainly if the solution comes from Apple and it’s native to the operating system, there’s a better chance it’ll be compatible. When Apple does an update, they’ll update all or most of the features as needed.

In the end, I do not for a moment believe you have to abandon everything that was left behind in the good old days. Not everything is obsolete. Maybe, as I said, a shave and a haircut is all they need to prove once and for all that everything old is new again.

Related Articles

• The iMac Report: Apple Left the Proprietary World a Decade Ago
• Apple Needs to Open Up!
• The Apple Security Report: Safari Needs Better Protection!
• The 10.6 Report: What About the Help System?
• The Leopard Report: Almost Six Months Later