Microsoft is stupid. They don’t get it, and after nearly 30 years, I doubt they ever will. Gates was an opportunist and not particularly creative and Steve Ballmer is a lunatic with no real vision. What do you expect from such a pair? I challenge you to produce a single shred of evidence that Microsoft has ever created something original, and it can’t be an acquisition, either. You will find nothing. Windows 7 is such a blatant and baldfaced copy of Mac OS X its ridiculous, and that’s the only way Microsoft figures it can maintain its ever dwindling market share.

Am I an Apple fan boy? Sure as hell am! I’m not ashamed to admit it, just like I’m pleased to admit that I was an LA Kings fan back when Gretsky was still on the ice and McSorley was cracking skulls. Apple, since Steve Jobs return in 1997, has fostered a steady and relentless growth, smoothly taking the few bumps along the way in stride and never missing step (i.e., Cube, HiFi, build quality issues). Now Apple, the company the press couldn’t stop using the word ‘beleagured’ to describe, is now a powerhouse in the mobile media and smart phone industry segments, and has been steadily growing their computer systems market share.

This is not the kind of market Apple can simply take over. People are invested in hundreds, even thousands, of dollars in PC gear and software and they won’t simply dump it all because Apple says boo. Considering that, it was brilliant that Apple started up the iPod industry and reshaped the music market single-handedly. I’m betting Jobs knew that they couldn’t grow on computers alone because Microsoft had the 90% marketshare. Then Apple came out with the iPhone to show people what a real computer can be like, another brilliant stroke. How can people not wonder how easy a Mac is to use when they love their iPhone.

Companies look to see maybe a 1% response rate on their marketing material as a gain, but that material isn’t a product in itself. Salespeople have to convert those prospects into customers. Apple’s sales material is the iPod and iPhone, and people are paying to get those slick, digital pamphlets. Now, however, Apple is showing us two new possibilities with a single product, the iPad. Either they are showing potential converts that there is now an easier path to Apple fealty  or they are showing us all a very likely possible future of computing. I’m leaning towards both being true, and potentially, a third or fourth reason I’m not smart enough to figure out yet.

The biggest problem we are going to face as we march into the future of technology is wrapping ourselves around the concept of what computing is to us. Computer technology has grown steadily since the personal computer hit the scene in 1977 with the Apple I. When Apple rolled out the Mac in 1984, it created the desktop publishing market which showed everyone what a desktop computer could do, and the market grew from there. In general, though, there’s little about daily computing which requires as much raw horsepower we have grown towards.

There are some industries which demand such power, like the CAD/CAM users in architecture, engineering, and in the entertainment industries like music, video games, and movies, but what about email, web browsing, word processing, spreadsheets, and even multimedia-strong stuff like presentations, listening to music, watching movies or streaming web video requires 8GBs of RAM, a quad-core CPU, and 1GB of video RAM? The last thing I need to read an email is a $3,000 PC workstation when I’ve been pleased to read it on my BlackBerry for years.

I have a strong feeling that these are some of the arguments Apple has been making with itself in order to justify the development and eventual release of the iPad. Remember how I opened this piece with saying that Microsoft is stupid? Apple’s iPad is your proof. Microsoft can’t engineer itself out of a paper bag and is only in the lead because they were able to get away with questionable marketing practices before the FTC and the Federal government had enough smart people to catch on, and by then it was too late. With Windows 3.11, Windows 95, and Windows NT floating around the corporate workplace, companies who had invested millions in custom development were unable to turn the ship in time to miss the iceberg.

Over time, Microsoft made strong efforts to make it clear that basing your business on the Microsoft platform was not only smart, but essential. You could do it with other systems, but the Mac was too girly and UNIX was too complicated. You practically NEEDED Microsoft to make your business run, and corporate America lapped it up because Apple wouldn’t counter, the UNIXes were pleased with their massive government contracts, and people didn’t know any better. Now we have a computer culture built on the idea that more powerful makes things work better. Even Apple has had to play that game, since its core to the American consumer and cannot be displaced.

So, Steve Jobs comes along and says something like, “We can’t dig them out because they are too entrenched, so we need to flank them and catch them in places they are unfamiliar.” The first place turned out to be the mobile media market, and Microsoft is completely inept in that space, even when they build their own hardware, the completely miserable Zune. Apple built the mobile media market when there was very little action in that space, but when they entered the mobile phone market there were already a large number of players there, including Microsoft. Microsoft had even managed to carve out a good chunk of that market for itself since Palm was unable to fix its own problems.

Apple, confident with its 75% marketshare in mobile media with its killer iPod and with eyes on making it better, saw an opportunity in the mobile phone space. I suspect that the iPod Touch was the next iteration of the iPod for Apple, and that they saw the possibility that it might work as a phone, too, and worked on that for a few years until they perfected it. One look at the smartphone market when Apple rolled out the iPod you could clearly see that there was chaos and a lack of clarity, with RIM on top with its BlackBerry, which has changed little in 10 years. Palm was the same, with its languishing Treo line on a platform from the previous decade. Microsoft was doing well because companies like HTC built their own UIs on top of Microsoft’s super-old UI. Not exactly a set of barn burners.

It was clear how badly people wanted a good phone when lines for the first day of iPhone availability were massive. The millions of iPhone users are speaking with their wallets and Apple managed to make up 35% of the smartphone market in about two years, a shockingly strong growth rate, and that number grows. The question arises, now that we are aware of the iPad, what Apple’s intentions have been with the iPhone. My spidey-sense tells me that there is a chance that Apple is guiding the computer-buying public in a direction which requires less power, offers more perceived speed, takes up less space, and handles everything the average user needs.

I look at the iPad and I don’t see the slick industrial design, light weight, durable finish, and clean interface. I see the reality that most people spend their time in email, browsing the web, watching and/or listening to media, reading, playing games, and other relatively low-level activities. I don’t see the problems with multi-tasking since it is an illusion. We are capable of paying attention to only one thing at a time. We can change focus to several different things, but we can already do that with the purportedly non-multi-tasking iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad simply by switching applications and being placed back right where we were when we left. I don’t see needing an in-built camera, since I’d rather use a real camera to take pictures. Do you really want your history to be captured by a crappy little phone cam?

I am convinced that the iPad will be a huge hit for Apple and that later this year, or sometime next year we will see the introduction of something like the iMac Mini, a stationary iPad with a 12-15″ display which is designed as a sort of kiosk for the home and which will likely be around $750. We might even see the demise of the Apple TV in its current form, where its next iteration might be a simple storage bay and connectivity hub for the UI which lives on an iPod, iPhone, or iPad. You can’t tell me that would not be near the ultimate in home theater.

I don’t have an oracle’s vision into the future, and like any pundit I can only read the tealeaves of the past to try to discern the hazy comings of mankind, but I think Apple has left us a rather clear trail of its past efforts and, from them, I think I can see where we are going. We need only be bold enough to say to ourselves that we are willing to entertain the possibility that Apple has it right and Microsoft, despite being the biggest, doesn’t.

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