The other day, when I forgot to Fast Forward through some TV ads, I caught one for Microsoft that struck me as one huge embarrassment. It seemed that father and son were seated next to each other working on anonymous notebooks. The father completed a spreadsheet, no doubt Excel, and the son took over, adding a few flourishes that delivered results frightening close to a badly done 1990's Flash animation. It came complete with what came across on my TV as ragged lettering.

The message: If you want to create that junk on your PC, get Windows 7.

I had to wonder how Microsoft's executives and ad agency came to believe such a message would drive the supposed excellence of their product home. Sure, it's great for family values to see parents and children getting along. That's a good thing. But if they hoped to demonstrate that Windows 7 was somehow empowering someone's creativity, they failed, utterly. But that's nothing new.

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An interesting sidelight of Apple's blowout quarter is how quickly the company is soaring past Microsoft. As sales of Windows falter, Apple is firing on all cylinders. Indeed, media analysts hoping for a big fall are clearly going to have to wait a long time for Apple's momentum to slow.

Meantime, I have to think how things have changed in the tech industry.

When I first started using Macs in the 1980s, they weren't taken very seriously beyond a small core of content creators, such as musicians, producers, and graphic artists. As recording engineers began to bring Macs into their studios, and traditional typesetting companies went Mac, I was repeatedly informed that I had bet on the wrong horse. Real computers, so to speak, used MS-DOS. Macs were toys, and, besides, there wasn't much software available for them.

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I'm sure you realize that the release of Apple's financials is a staged event. The numbers were already present long before they were unleashed to an expectant audience. The don't just emerge full blown in an email from the company accountant, ready to immediately present to the financial analysts, investors, and the public at large.

Even though every single detail about Apple's last quarter was known to them for hours or days before you learned what they were, Apple's executives remained stone-faced. There was not a clue as to what they'd contain. Sure, the media has been busy evaluating the pros and the cons, and trying to read the tea leaves. Industry surveys were probed to see a sales trend, and certainly the fact that Verizon Wireless moved more iPhones than any other smartphone in the last quarter only confirmed expectations of stellar numbers when Apple released their quarterly earnings Tuesday afternoon.

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Knowing that Apple's earnings for the last financial quarter will be posted hours after this article is published, I won't hazard a guess as to how the numbers will turn out. Instead I'm going to look a bit closer at the products and services you might see from Apple over the coming year. But understand that, if I go off the deep end and come up with anything a tad outrageous, so be it, although I think my observations are on the conservative side of the ledger.

In recent days, there have been published reports that Apple will, in the next few months, release new Wi-Fi hardware to support the burgeoning 802.11ac standard. Although the standard won't be ratified until the second half of the year, that won't stop manufacturers from releasing hardware based on the preliminary specs. Supposedly they will all be upgradeable via firmware to the release version.

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