It's been years since I wrote about the Macintosh or even used one regularly. I spent much of the 1980s covering Apple as a reporter and editor. In September of 1983, I was lured away from producing PCWorld magazine to start a new publication called Macworld. I subsequently worked on two now defunct Mac weeklies, Macintosh Today and Macweek. But for the last 10 years, I have been a Windows user.

Now, I have a craving to join the Mac user community again. It's just a craving at this point, as I am still feeling the influence of the Steve Jobs reality distortion field after attending his keynote at Macworld Expo yesterday. Jobs could sell ice to Eskimos, and he gave one of his typically compelling presentations for why Apple has a chance to gain a wider audience despite tough competition and economic conditions.

The conventional wisdom is that the Mac sits on the sidelines in the corporate world, consigned primarily to graphics and publishing functions. Windows is the lord of the desktop, and even Linux is making inroads as a desktop platform. According to IDC, Linux could surpass the Mac as the number two desktop operating system in the next year or two.

In addition, Merrill Lynch analysts reinstated coverage of Apple yesterday with a "sell" rating, saying that Apple would continue to suffer market share losses on top of financial losses for its first quarter of 2003, which ended in December. The analysts also said that the company's product differentiation strategy was unlikely to succeed in a business of increasingly commoditized product offerings.

Based on what Apple and maestro Jobs showed yesterday, I wouldn't count Apple out. Jobs introduced a number of new products, demonstrating that innovation and differentiation are still alive at Apple.

In fact, Apple keeps setting the bar higher for the industry in personal computing. The question is whether best of breed products are sufficient to alter market dynamics and the buying habits of corporations for whom cost reduction and platform standardization are key drivers of technology acquisition. The Dell/Microsoft combo, for example, seems to be doing quite well without matching Apple's level of innovation.

Jobs cited that 68 percent of the 7.8 million visitors to Apple's "Switcher" Web site in the last several months were indeed Windows users. He claimed that 50 percent of purchasers at Apple's 51 retail storefronts were Windows switchers. Although those figures point to more than a casual interest level, considering that the replacement cycle for PCs keeps getting longer, the numbers may not translate to market share gains and profits.

Since Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company has steadily executed on a strategy to deliver a robust operating system with Mac OS X and the most innovative desktop and notebook computers.

At Macworld yesterday, the company introduced two new notebook systems with state-of-the-art design and wireless networking features. The $1,799, 12-inch PowerBook is especially interesting to me as mobile user who likes to travel light. The 17-inch version provides a good example of how Apple innovates in a well- established product category. The unit includes a unique light sensor that automatically adjusts screen as well as keyboard brightness based on the available ambient light.

But the reason Apple machines can sometimes make your jaw drop is the software experience that comes with the hardware. As Intuit founder and Chairman of the Executive Committee Scott Cook expressed it to me, "Hardware is a lump of overpriced sand-software is what sells."

Apple's new lumps of sand are shiny and cool, but what's truly interesting now is that the company is starting to build an integrated software applications platform and to wean itself from reliance on Microsoft.

On the consumer end, the iLife suite for managing music, digital photography, video editing and DVD creation is an integrated set of products that take much of the headache and complexity out of performing those tasks. Some of the new features, such as the touch up brush in iPhoto 2 and the themes in iDVD 3, drew huge applause from the partisan crowd.

Jobs claimed that Apple's digital hub software (iLife) "is so far ahead of everybody it's not funny." Coincident with Jobs' keynote, Microsoft launched its Microsoft Plus Digital Media Edition for Windows XP. The software includes some functions similar to Apple's iLife. Microsoft's offering is not as mesmerizing as Apple's, but Windows has achieved success so far without being superior to the Macintosh experience.

Microsoft is charging $19.95 for its digital hub bundle (including a $5 rebate), while Apple is offering iPhoto 2, iTunes 3 and iMovie 3 for free, and a bundle of those applications as well as iDVD 3 for $49. It's worthwhile to check out the two offerings and form your own opinion about which platform delivers the best digital lifestyle hub.

Apple is also taking on Microsoft with its new browser and presentation software. Apple's Safari browser, based on the open source KHTML code base, comes into a market dominated by Microsoft's Internet Explorer. For Mac users, it will be a great relief, given how slow and buggy IE is on the Mac.

Is a Mac browser enough to make you want to buy a Mac? No, but as part of larger suite of productivity applications down the road, it could be. The new Keynote presentation software is a start in that direction. The $99 program has all the fine touches that one can expect from a program which had Steve Jobs as the primary beta tester. In addition, Keynote imports and exports PowerPoint files, and is based on an XML-based open file format.

If Apple can come up with an e-mail/word processor that is integrated with the other programs, the world may have far superior alternative to Microsoft Office than Sun's Star Office or OpenOffice.org. The spreadsheet component may be tougher to deal with given the surfeit of Excel macros, but Apple could satisfy most needs of smaller businesses.

During his keynote, Jobs said that Apple would "do for digital lifestyle applications what Microsoft Office did for productivity." He was like a proud father showing off his offspring. He gets exciting about cross dissolves, digital movie making, fast browsers, and the quality of the buttons and fonts. For him, the goal seems to be attaining a kind of beauty and product quality that satisfies his sense of aesthetic virtue.

If Jobs gets as excited about e-mail, word processing and other productivity applications as he does about digital lifestyle and presentation software, I would give Apple a good chance to succeed over the next three years in becoming more relevant to the business world. It won't be an overnight phenomenon, but an alliance of some kind between Apple and the Linux community could prove interesting. In any case, it's worth keeping tabs on Apple, just to see what the maestro has up his sleeve.

Will Apple find a larger place on business networks? Will the Mac succeed in gaining desktop share? Can Apple make a dent in Microsoft's desktop software dominance? TalkBack to share your views. A nd be sure to check out our full coverage from Macworld Expo this week, including video coverage of Steve Jobs' keynote.