I suppose a company’s life-cycle might resemble that of a living creature. Some die rapidly, often without achieving success. Others attain the pinnacle of success, grab the brass ring and discover the end of the rainbow. A precious few, such as Microsoft, come to dominate their industry. You can almost think of them as invulnerable, yet it seems that only oil companies maintain that status for terribly long.

Consider the 1980s, when IBM was king of the PC universe. Today the market leaders are Dell and HP, whereas IBM’s PC business was sold off to Lenovo, a company based in China. If you went back in time roughly two decades and told anyone how the PC business would look today — and don’t forget about Apple using Intel chips for the Mac — you’d get laughed at or put away in a little room with extremely soft walls.

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Once upon a time, the name Microsoft invoked feelings of abject fear from most of its competitors. And no wonder. The world’s largest software company was notorious for entering PC-related markets and squeezing out competitors. Its victories over the Mac and Netscape are legendary.

However, as Apple continues to dominate the headlines, not just in the tech pages of your daily newspaper, but just about everywhere, it seems that Microsoft doesn’t quite seem so tough anymore. For example, when the Zune music player arrived last year, fanboy fawning over the product was surprisingly low-key. Except for a few apparently subsidized sites early on, the product’s buzz quickly fizzed out.

These days, you hardly hear much about the Zune music player, which you have to regard as an abject failure. Even Microsoft’s own promotional efforts to yield memorable results, as if they knew it was a misguided venture.

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For a long, long time now, you’ve been told that Apple designs the best user interfaces. They “just work,” and the learning curve — such as it is — is relatively short. Of course, that doesn’t explain the consistent sales of “Dummies” books about various and sundry Apple products through the years, but compared to other personal computing platforms, Apple is far and away the best.

But it’s not perfect, and every so often, I want to change the things that come out of left field to irritate me and others. I realize that you may not find what I have to say inspires such feelings, but that’s why we offer a Comments panel here, so you can chime in with your own annoyances.

It’s also possible that some of these problems can be resolved, and I’ll start with one, since the matter managed to upset one of my clients until I revealed the solution. You see the client in question, Jack, is a long-time Mac user and a senior citizen who demonstrates that the age of 82 is the new 60. He’s bright, active, and there’s very little in his demeanor to show his age, except for an occasional slight shaking of his hands.

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You can’t imagine the consternation on the part of some Mac users after reading published reports that Mac OS X Leopard was being postponed until October because Apple wanted to improve compatibility with Windows Vista.

Without much thought, some folks ignored the illogical nature of the basic premise and the story simply took off. It’s not that Apple has helped much, since they’ve said very little about Leopard in recent months. Everything about Leopard’s progress is unofficial, with reports from folks who ought to know better about the state of 10.5’s development process, which was said not to be going so well.

So where are all the “top secret” features touted by Steve Jobs at last year’s WWDC? His excuse was that he didn’t want to give Microsoft a chance to copy those features for Windows Vista. As a practical matter, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Even if Microsoft wanted to steal some of those features, it might take a year or two to alter an operating system that was already in the final Q&A process.

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