Today's Wall Street Journal features a great article questioning whether Apple Computer has lost its punch. While iPod has been immensely successful, sales of its core desktop and laptop systems have been flat or slightly negative.

Besides the price difference, I think another factor weighs into people's decisions not to switch to the Mac platform: a perception of widely unavailable software. Want to play Yahoo! games? Sorry, it doesn't work on Macs. Does The Weather Channel's "Desktop Weather" tool look cool? That won't work on a Mac either. And forget about any games--the selection of games for the Mac OS is like counting Red Sox fans at Yankee Stadium.

The worst gap of all: Blackberry. Research in Motion, which makes Blackberry, doesn't offer Mac-compatible sync software. In fact, the Web site for Microsoft's Virtual PC software for Mac mentions syncing your Blackberry as a reason to buy this Windows emulator. This is awful PR for Apple. Every time someone visits the Blackberry Web site, this perception of software unavailability is reinforced.

Instead of focusing on its own ease of use--which I think everyone already concedes--Apple should launch a high-profile campaign to help software companies create Mac-compatible applications. If that means sending Apple's own engineers and programmers over to another company like a consulting firm would, do it. And tell us about it when it's done. Fix the Yahoo! games situation, and then launch a campaign highlighting Yahoo! games and Mac. If getting RIM to offer Blackberry sync software for the Mac OS means Apple has to absorb some or even most of that cost, it's a gamble worth taking. There's something in it for these other companies, too, and it would help repair what I think is Apple's longest-standing (and largely most accurate) image problem.