Two events that may seem unrelated have converged this week to paint a picture about one company on the ascendancy and another company that’s faltering and seems to only understand how to damage its tarnished reputation even further.

First came Apple’s surprising announcement that some 11 million copies of Safari 4.0 were downloaded during the first three days it was available. Even more intriguing is the fact that six million of those downloads came from Windows users.

Now as you might recall, Apple’s first foray into building a Windows version brought force a Mac-like interface in all its glory. In a sense, the Windows user was being transported to another operating system universe. I can see, in part, this being a good thing, or just doing to that platform what some Windows developers have done to the Mac over the years by delivering apps that failed to follow Mac OS conventions. My first reaction was “serves them right.”

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Before I get started with this commentary, let me assure you that I never take any of my predictions seriously. Yet it seems as if The Night Owl caught a wave with one particular article, and now other sites, including the standard rumor sources, are getting into the act.

So what am I talking about?

Well, on the heels of my admittedly casual prediction, recently, that we might learn preliminary details of Mac OS 10.6 at the WWDC next week, comes a claim that it will not support Macs with PowerPC chips.

Let’s, for the moment, consider the impact of this is true. You see, Intel-based Macs only went on sale in 2006, and the last conversions took place that summer, with the release of the Mac Pro. So if this particular rumor is to be taken seriously, and 10.6 appears some time next year, Apple would abandon support for many Macs that are barely more than three years old. That is certainly not in keeping with their previous approach on dealing with legacy hardware.

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When I first started writing computer books in 1994, I remember being asked whether I had a copy of Word installed on my Mac? You see, as with most publishers then and now, they rely heavily on Word’s Track Changes feature to monitor the editorial production process from the original manuscript to the final version that is used to generate the printed pages.

Now Word actually originated on the Mac, but it had its share of ups and downs over the years, and some of you might suggest the latter is the most common result. Word’s near-downfall occurred with the infamous version 6, which was a bad PC port, using their notorious “P code” to employ the same code base for both Mac and Windows.

Aside from the fact that it was slow to launch, the interface was dark, dreary, and lacked the proper Mac-like fit and finish that we demand for our favored platform. Yes, there were subsequent updates that addressed performance shortcomings, but you could almost get the feeling that Office for the Mac was dead, as far as Microsoft was concerned.

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Without mentioning the names of the usual offenders, I often wonder if some tech pundits exist solely to find bad news, whatever it might be, the better to increase the hit count, and regardless of whether the bad tidings are accurate or not.

Take Firefox, the cross-platform browser that’s reinvigorated the tarnished reputation of the Mozilla organization in the wake of Microsoft’s trouncing defeat of the original Netscape years ago. These days Firefox and its derivatives, including Camino for Mac OS X and a reborn Navigator, hold over 15% of the browser market. In some countries, it’s more popular than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. And Apple’s Safari isn’t doing to badly either.

The newest version of Firefox, 3.0, is also months late. The first public beta, for example, came out Monday, and already there were complaints about possible lingering bugs by people who never actually used the application on any platform. It all seems to stem from a statement on the part of a Mozilla official that some 700 bugs remained in the latest version of Firefox, but only about 20% of them would be closed, or fixed, before release.

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