One of the downsides of a company as secretive as Apple is that customers and the media will feel compelled to speculate about new products. Some of that speculation will be true, some of it not, but it’s usually hard to know in advance which predictions will pan out except through logic, reason and a lots of good luck.

The biggest downside of all is that, if the predictions all point to a single product or service, expectations increase. Folks come to believe such a thing to come from Apple in the near future. If the product is an upgrade to one of the existing lines, it creates the annoying prospect that sales will dip temporarily as customers wait for a revision.

If the revision doesn’t arrive, then Apple suffers from lost revenue. This happened to some degree after the original migration to Intel processors was announced during the WWDC in 2005. In one fell swoop, all of Apple’s Mac hardware was rendered obsolete, kaput. Originally, the transition was expected to be completed in 2007. Yes, that’s what they said back then.

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I know that when Apple moved from the PowerPC to Intel processors, you could hear and feel the groans around the world. How could Apple possibly abandon the processor platform that made their products the fastest PCs on the planet?

How indeed!

Well, as it turned out, the PowerPC roadmap didn’t favor Apple. When Steve Jobs first demonstrated the original Power Mac G5, he promised there would be a 3GHz version within a year. It never arrived, nor did a mobile version of the chip that didn’t fry the case or soak up battery life in minutes rather than hours.

Apple did the logical thing: They had parallel projects developing Mac OS X for both PowerPC and X86 processors. So if the former didn’t suit their needs, they could switch to the latter without a serious delay. Indeed, the Intel transition began in January 2006 and concluded just eight months later, way ahead of schedule. The main reason for that was that “secret” Mac OS X for Intel project, first revealed the previous summer, although the rumor sites had talked about it for years.

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As Apple is poised to launch MobileMe this week for an unsuspecting public who may not have even asked for it, you have to wonder whether this is a key move to help Macs penetrate the Windows market big time.

You see, Apple seems to have done its level best to make .Mac’s successor look platform agnostic. You get basically the same features whether you’re using a Mac or a PC, which is in keeping with Apple’s larger strategy throughout their product line. In fact, some of you feel the new interface for MobileMe (and even the name, in fact) is reminiscent of Windows, so it’s clear what Apple is doing here.

You see, before our very eyes, Apple has made all of its hardware Windows-compatible. I can’t imagine anyone would have expected such a thing, but it’s true.

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Just today, my copy of the August 2008 issue of Macworld arrived, with a fascinating headline situated above the title: “Mac CLones: Are They Coming Back?”

This would seem a silly proposition, since Steve Jobs ejected the last round of cloners, because their actions were threatening Apple. While the company’s erstwhile executives felt that ceding to the constant demands to open the platform would expand the Mac platform, they encountered the reverse. Aggressive startups, such as Power Computing, went with a vengeance after Apple’s core market with cheaper and faster products.

Indeed, Apple was hemorrhaging lots of red ink when Jobs took over as “interim” CEO in those days, and a lot of the members of the tech press and even Wall Street even felt Apple had gone down for the last count.

However, so many things have changed since then, the most important of which is the fact that Apple’s sales are higher than ever, and Mac market share is increasing at long last, after moving in the opposite direction for so many years.

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