One thing is sure: Nothing Apple can or would do to enhance the iPhone’s capabilities will satisfy everyone. Whenever a new feature appears, people will complain that it’s not being implemented properly. If Apple doesn’t add a feature, many of you will complain that they’re being boneheaded about it. And that may only be one of the more complimentary responses.

Certainly, deciding how to enhance a product is a huge juggling match. Some companies will simply add a capability without considering how it integrates with the rest of the product’s functions, whether it’s easy to use, and whether it actually does something that really makes an improvement.

One of my biggest complaints about the Windows platform is that Microsoft doesn’t consider such matters seriously. Just add the feature and figure out the rest later, and I suspect a large portion of the consumer electronics industry approaches the issue with the same lack of foresight.

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So I was visiting a long-time client the other day, restoring his data onto a new hard drive. Once I completed my tasks, he wanted to try out a few things for himself.

First, he opened Mail, launched Address Book and brought up a contact entry with a load of names. After looking them over for a moment, he started selecting and copying a few to paste into the To column on a new email message.

Well, I stopped him there, and tried, gently I assure you, to explain how contacts are supposed to be entered into Address Book how the Group feature works, and how his contact list can be accessed directly from Mail’s Address Panel, in the Window menu. He protested that he’s done it that way for years, and he’s not about to change now. So I let him be.

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On the one hand, all the mobile phone carriers are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to tell potential customers about their great products and service. Sometimes the ads are about the latest cool mobile device, but others talk about the superior network, with fewer dropped calls and more reception bars.

We have one carrier, Verizon Wireless, demonstrating rather graphically how their incredible network will follow you wherever you go. I guess the “can you hear me now” promotion has seen its day.

In the real world, however, mobile phones don’t always work so well. When it comes to voice quality, most calls sound inferior to what you can get with two tin cans and a single wire. Alexander Graham Bell must be spinning in his grave.

Part of the problem is the switch to all-digital cell phone systems. It appears the carriers are taking advantage of the technology and compressing signals more and more to handle additional simultaneous connections. That may help them support more customers, but it doesn’t necessarily play well with voice quality. Hearing the caller within a digital haze, or sounding as if they were talking to you from beneath the ocean, is just not acceptable. Surely they can do better.

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All right, I know some of you have complained that I tend to write lurid headlines. Maybe there’s even a suggestion that the contents of the articles themselves don’t exactly match that promise.

I will quibble with you readers over that, particularly this time. After all, I’m sure most people would laugh loudly at even the suggestion that Microsoft is about to go out of business. They are, after all, the world’s largest software company, and their Windows operating system lives on over 90% of the personal computer desktops around the planet.

Sure Apple has made huge strides, with Macs now garnering over 10% market share when it comes to retail notebook sales, although global figures are still in the lower single digits. So where do I come up with that silly stuff about Microsoft?

First of all, I’m not suggesting that the executives at Microsoft are pulling the sort of shenanigans that did Enron in. That would seem to be a stretch. I also think that the SEC is, in light of the nation’s ongoing financial turmoil, more apt to observe signs that a company might be keeping extra sets of books or seriously fudging their profit and loss statements.

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