Well, maybe not the whole world, but a healthy portion of it that resides exactly within the dimensions that set apart my body from the rest of the universe’s matter.

No, I’m not yawning because I prefer Apple products over Microsoft products. I’m yawning because if someone stops doing something, and that something wasn’t doing anything, what does it matter if they go?

Microsoft has been sucking for almost a decade now. It’s lost its way. One look at its web sites can tell you that. A potpourri of designs, domain names, styles and colors. It shows a company with 0 direction, no Grand Plan. If the eyes are the window to the soul, web sites are a window to a business’ cohesion.

If a look at MS’s wild array of web sites don’t invoke in you a feeling of unbounded, glorious schizophrenia, read the long, sad story of Vista, née Longhorn.

If I was Gates, I would have stepped in and commanded my underlings to develop a unifying company theme, and would have followed that with a web site and PR image unification. Oh what, that’s expensive? C’mon, this is Microsoft we’re talking about. I would have gotten the most important 100 people in the company together and asked things like

1. “Can anyone answer this question in one sentence: what do we do?”
2. “Should we be making hardware?”
3. “Why can’t we crack the search world after 5 years of instense effort?”

Microsoft needs a big fat reinvention like Apple got in 1998, but Gates didn’t do it, and at the twilight of his watch the company’s only successes are 1. holding onto their business clients with MS’s (admittedly very good) business software, and 2. Xbox empire.

So when the world mourns Gates’ departure, I say “Why”?

This news.com story details a bold Steve Jobs poke at Flash, Adobe’s ubiquitous web content delivery technology.

Jobs used the Apple shareholders’ meeting to publicly dismiss the the full-blown PC Flash version as “too slow to be useful” on the iPhone. He then went on to describe the mobile version–Flash Lite–as “not capable of being used with the Web.”

That’s an unusual–albeit refreshingly frank–way to talk in public about a business partner. Give Jobs credit for speaking his mind, although I very much doubt Adobe appreciated his candor.

That jolted me into looking at where Flash stands today.

No iPhone Flash Support

Flash didn’t debut on the iPhone, and it looks like it’s not going to be part of what many say is the World’s Best Phone for some time, if ever.

YouTube is Moving Away from Flash

Months ago, in an effort to support the iPhone and AppleTV, YouTube began the massive task of re-encoding its millions of videos in the much-more “open” H.264 standard.

It’s Still Big, Bloaty, Proprietary, and Update Hungry

And resource-hungry: watch your processor activity move up fast when you use it. Adobe/Macromedia (Flash’s former master) had years to make it run fast, but instead they chose to add features, a conundrum that is the result of one of the Laws of Programming: you can have features or light weight, but not both. Flash is a 5MB download.

That’s not to say that right now we’re seeing Flash in decline. Its installed base is absurdly broad. But if it’s not on revolutionary devices like the iPhone, we’re probably seeing the early writing on the wall. And that wall is graced with the likes of RealPlayer, Quark Immedia and other names on it.

After Hours $184.10

Change: +9.74 +5.59%

Apple Inc. shares rose $9.06 to $183.42. The company reported fiscal fourth-quarter net earnings $904 million, or $1.01 a share, on revenue of $6.22 billion. Lat year, Apple earned $542 million, or 62 cents a share, on $4.84 billion in sales. Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial forecast earnings of 86 cents a share on revenue of $6.07 billion. Among the quarter’s highlights were sales of 2.16 million Macintosh PCs and 1.11 million iPhones.

I’m redoing a client’s Dell hunk of junk XPS tower right freaking now and I made the mistake of thinking the Dell Windows installer would autodetect the internal hard drive. Oops, of course not. The hard drive is SATA and so I have to create a floppy containing the SATA drivers just so the Windows Installer that shipped with the Dell can detect the hard drive which, well, shipped with the Dell. Nice. A freaking floppy!

I still find myself at this same agonizing task of very slowly committing suicide via Dell. I can boot into the current Windows installation from the internal SATA drive, but even with the floppy containing the SATA driver, the Windows installer can’t find the hard drive.

Comparatively speaking, all my Macs have been much easier to deal with than any of the Windows, or even Linux, systems that I have dealt with. Even though I enjoy using Linux and mucking about with config files, I’m never enjoying my job when I have to fool with Windows.

– and later —

Turns out the driver on the disc I received from the customer contained the wrong SATA driver altogether. Downloaded the newest SATA driver from Dell and it worked fine. Well until the printer driver reinstall failed, but then the printer was suddenly recognized, and IE 7 never showed up in Windows or Microsoft Update. Even though both said I had authenticated with WGA. I download the update manually and told the client to make sure it installed because I was 4 hours past do. I emailed her to check up on the system from hell. Oh did I mention downloading the HP driver via an optional Windows/Microsoft update crashed the system…hard..with a blue screen…some sort of fatal exception…buffer overflow. I had to roll back and get the heck out of there. I’ve got to come back to network all the machines after the FIOS install anyway so I can always rebuild the system software again then.

The XPS Gen 3, or whatever awful name Dell marketing came up with for the system, is an ugly hunk of junk with a case that didn’t fit quite right until I made a blood sacrifice. Literally. I have an inch or two gash on my thumb/hand area where I cut myself trying to get the case back together. When I picked the system up, the whole case was misaligned and wouldn’t close properly. I’m not sure what the Geek Squad did to this thing when they had it before me, but things were in dire shape.

[ed: I pulled this from here to show that, while pain can be found on all sides of computer maintenance, only Windows offers that perfect storm of frustration, anger, exasperation and thoughts of indirect violence — Matt]

I think that’s more of a statement than a question these days. Vista is, at best, seeing lukewarm reception in the OS marketplace. And the Zune? Hmmm. Not much to say about that. Microsoft has seen a string of music services go down in flames to Apple’s iTunes Store and iPod juggernaut.

So how about that core?

If Microsoft resolves all those concerns, no one (including the Open Document Format camp) will have a problem with it. Microsoft doesn’t seem to grok that true openness breeds trust. If it were submitting a truly open standard, it wouldn’t matter what anyone thought of the company submitting it.

It looks like Microsoft’s days of rolling over opposition with a superior lobbying budget and the lack of clear alternatives is over. It might actually have to play nicely now with the other children. Imagine that.

To me the question isn’t so much is the core business fading, but rather can its new businesses and related services like Xbox make up the difference? If Microsoft can iron out significant manufacturing problems with the Xbox 360, and keep its (very) healthy share of the server and corporate desktop markets, it’ll be ok for the next half decade. If not, watch out.