As most of our regular readers know, I’m no fan of Wall Street. It’s not that I have ever had enough money to play the market, but I rather think that I’d do as well or better in Las Vegas. On the other hand, my budget at the gambling tables has never exceeded $20, so who am I to talk?

Certainly in the current economic climate, I am even less inclined to want to entrust any stock broker with my hard-earned money for investment purposes. But I’ve been wondering about Apple’s stock price, which has shown a steady rise since the iPhone 3.0 SDK was unveiled earlier this month.

Now it’s not that Wall Street loves Apple. Usually it’s the reverse. Indeed, in the past, you’ve no doubt seen Apple’s stock price dip even though the company is reporting record sales. Go figure.

This time, maybe the market is just trying harder to find reason to be optimistic, and perhaps that explains it. Or maybe they are carefully looking at Apple’s ongoing game plan for once, what little anyone knows about it outside the company, and seeing lots of future earnings potential.

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It’s hard to believe that the iPhone will be two years old in just a couple of months, and that, my friends, is the duration of a standard contract with a wireless carrier.

Now I assume those of you who didn’t trade up last year still have your first-generation model in regular use, and that it is still working quite nicely. That in itself may be quite an achievement in our disposable society, where most handsets can barely last half that long. I know my original iPhone is now in another owner’s hands, and my 3G model is working pretty much the same as new. Since it is also ensconced in a translucent case, it is, so far as I can tell, free of serious blemishes. Even though dropped a few times, the glass face remains unblemished.

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More than two months after Steve Jobs took his extended hiatus to recover from his various health issues, some members of the tech media, clearly in desperate search for a story, are suggesting that Apple no longer has any creativity left. The illusion they present is that Steve Jobs was the one-man band who managed all the significant developments at Apple, and his absence will ultimately deprive the company of its primary innovative force.

Just for the sake of argument — though it argues against what Apple’s other executives have claimed — let’s assume for the moment that Jobs has had no involvement whatever in the company’s decision-making in recent weeks. Even if that’s the case, what about the decisions he made prior to that? Are we to assume that none of those decisions had any impact on what Apple planned to do in 2009? Can you believe that, on the day of his departure, he told his team that they were on their own, and anything he said up till then was to be considered null and void?

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They say that first impressions are often the most important, and that a product that doesn’t grab you right away may be doomed to failure.

Now after a decently-long gestation period, the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer, version 8, is now available for download. Forgetting preliminary reports about its performance potential — or lack thereof — I decided to give it a fair shake, download a copy and try it out.

Well, typical of Microsoft’s products, this was not so easy a process. Let me explain, and don’t miss the contrast where an installation scenario is handled properly.

You see, when I first launched my Vista installation, which comes courtesy of a Parallels Desktop virtual machine, I got a familiar notice, but not from Microsoft. Instead, if was the Windows version of Apple’s Software Update, informing me about the recent updates to iTunes and QuickTime.

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

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