On this week’s episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE, Ted Landau reminds us how he once wrote a book entitled “Mac OS X Disaster Relief.” Unfortunately, Apple chose, in its infinite wisdom, not to offer this book to their customers because someone “higher up” in the Apple food chain decided that the words “disaster” and “Mac OS X” didn’t convey the correct image for the company.

After all, Apple doesn’t want you to think that you could ever confront a potential disaster with one of their products.

Then there was the time that Steve Jobs reportedly ordered all books from a certain publisher removed from the Apple retail stores when that publisher released a title about him. How dare they do that?

Of course, it’s also true that Apple is a private business and they can sell what they want, and if a particular product from a third party company doesn’t suit their requirements, even if those requirements are arbitrary, so be it. Unfortunately Apple gets lots of severe criticism whenever they make decisions of this sort, and highly publicized rejection of certain apps from the iPhone App Store has added more fuel to the fire.

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I am sometimes accused of writing lurid headlines just for the effect or the higher hit counts. I don’t agree. The headlines always relate to the content, and in this case, my theory is right on the money. What’s more, recent figures based on retail sales of new PCs from the NPD Group confirm the trend that will ultimately marginalize the rest of the PC makers and push Apple to the top of the heap.

Indeed, we’re already seeing how the industry trends are hurting Microsoft. For the first time since 1986, Microsoft has reported a full  year decrease in sales. Indeed, the stock market Thursday afternoon quickly reacted to the news that Microsoft’s revenue fell short of analyst expectations, dropping some 7.8 percent in after-hours trading.

For the most part, Microsoft’s excuse was to blame the economy and declining PC sales. Every PC that isn’t built means less revenue for Microsoft, which gets its OEM fee from virtually every unit sold.

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As I write this, Apple’s stock price is soaring, and that’s a surprise. Usually, after they release record-breaking financials, Wall Street seems to react negatively. No, I’m not about to explain the workings of the financial community, and I doubt anyone can with any meaningful level of accuracy.

The biggest difference this time out is the fact that the world economy is on life support, yet Apple still managed to report record revenues for a non-holiday quarter. Those Wall Street analysts, who always seem to on the wrong side of Apple’s numbers, are now surprisingly bullish.

How things have changed!

You have to wonder whether Apple is somehow using magic to defy gravity, but it may come down to something that you can understand with simple common sense, and that is that they simply build products people want to buy. This despite the fact that Apple has some serious competition in all their market segments, yet they’ve managed to surprise the naysayers again and again.

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All right, so if I heard someone tell me that Steve Jobs not only wasn’t going to deliver his famous keynote at the next Macworld Expo and that Apple itself would pull out of the event after 2009, I would tell them they were probably drinking too much Kool-Aid.

Yet, that’s precisely the news that was delivered by Apple this week, along with a refusal to comment upon the health of Steve Jobs.

Officially Apple says: “Apple is reaching more people in more ways than ever before, so like many companies, trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers. The increasing popularity of Apple’s Retail Stores, which more than 3.5 million people visit every week, and the Apple.com website enable Apple to directly reach more than a hundred million customers around the world in innovative new ways.

“Apple has been steadily scaling back on trade shows in recent years, including NAB, Macworld New York, Macworld Tokyo and Apple Expo in Paris.”

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