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Microsoft to Continue Mac Support
rakeswell writes "Though Microsoft's five-year agreement to support some Microsoft applications on the Mac has come to a close, Microsoft announces that it will continue its support of the platform. This means that new versions of Office, IE, ODBC, and Palm synchronization will be made available for Mac OS X. Also, they intend to build in .NET support for the Mac, though Microsoft says that they do not intend to push .NET for Mac developers."
Although my experience with the Mirosoft support site has been good, I have not had to use it much.
But I do know one thing....Microsoft supports its developers. With the MSDN Library and the Platform SDK documentation, one can find pretty much anything
I've never understood this line of thought. What specific business use is it that you would like to put a Mac to work doing? Get specific and I'm sure someone with a little spare time and patience would be happy to show you how to do it.
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It's a shame that the Mac developers who put out stuff like Office:Mac are working for such an ethically bankrupt company. They do really good work.
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I think these guys are among the most staunch Mac people. Willing to even work for the Beast to make sure we have a good version of Office.
I know some of these guys and trust me they are staunch Apple supporters.
yes, the MBU is almost a like a different company within MS. They really do get to make their own decisions, as is shown by the fact they write their mac apps from scratch, rather than roughly porting over their pc counterparts. This results in real mac apps that quite often end up putting their PC counterparts to shame.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
I beleive the poster means not abusing their monopoly. You can't be prosecuted for just having one.
No, the reason that Word/Excel are part of Mac Office is that they were written from the start (pretty much) to run on the Mac. Word & Excel had graphical interfaces on the Mac well before Word for Windows came out. The Mac versions of these apps were eventually built from the same codebase as their Windows counterparts using a windows portability library (WLM) developed internally at microsoft which was shipped as part of Visual C++ Macintosh Edition (which was the first project I worked on at MS). Access was always a Windows-only app and since they reimplemented all of the windows controls (to support Access Basic & Databinding) it would be pretty tricky to port it to the Mac.
Link, please. Or supporting evidence.
Believe me. To most average joe users, the distinction is lost (do you realize how many people are running Excel databases?).
That statement isn't quite as silly as it sounds; I once spent the better part of a summer working on an inventory database, and the first thing I did was convert it from an Excel spreadsheet to FileMaker. I don't know if they converted it back... hope they didn't...
/Brian
How can you say something like this? If Apple puts resources in to making OO run great on OSX, why would you complain about that? Or, perhaps you don't like choice, especially when Microsoft holds so much power over the office suites on Mac. Yes, Appleworks is great (I've been a big fan since ClarisWorks) but it's not really a competitor to MS Office, in large part because it doesn't focus on cross-platform support the way OO is. The fact that MS Office is dominant on Windows goes the majority of the way towards making it the dominant office suite on Macs. I personally agree with the parent and think Apple should pour at least some resources in to OO and eventually release their own version of the thing, with the UI set up to work perfectly with OSX. Would you complain about this?
And as for Mozilla... it might suck now on OSX, but it's a damn fine piece of technology, and the fact that it can be heavily customized means that it can be configured for full OSX style UI with some Javascript and CSS. You're not forced to use it, but this could be the default behavior for the OSX binary distribution of the program. Apple could even do it themselves, or... hell, even you could do it! Anyone can! Meanwhile, you're still stuck with a dated version of IE (which is hideously slow whenever I've used it on Mac) and Omniweb, which still needs DOM work. With these as your alternate choices, how can you say that this would be a bad thing?
But then... I left the Mac because I wanted the freedom to choose for myself what to use rather than what was handed to me. I guess things haven't changed that much then. sigh
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
I have never used Access to create an application, so you're probably right about the front end stuff. However, SQL Anywhere is a "real" server that runs on pretty nearly anything, and you can definitely use all the MS GUI tools to write apps that go against it. Its replication features are awesome, as is its performance. If I were writing a database application using MS tools and I needed more horsepower than what Access provides, I'd consider using VB and SQL Anywhere.
I will admit that Microsoft has made database administration a snap with its various databases, especially SQL Server 7 on Win2K, which is the last MS database product with which I worked. Sybase really dropped the ball on making their version usable. If you look at what Microsoft and Sybase did with SQL Server after they parted company, it's easy to see that Microsoft has done amazing things starting from the same code base and Sybase has let itself fall way behind. Well, that was the situation a couple years ago, when I last worked with these databases. Anyway, Microsoft may be an evil empire and all that, but most of their competitors have done more to screw themselves than Microsoft ever did to help them.
Also, getting back to SQL Anywhere, the original creators were the Watcom folks up in Waterloo, Ontario. Sybase acquired their technology when they purchased Powersoft. The real magic was done by Watcom.
The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank.
-- Scotty.
From 1997 to about 2000, Microsoft owned like $1.5M worth of non-voting shares. So they did kinda own some of it, but never had any influence (stock wise), over the company. It doesn't matter anyhoo, since M$ sold it all. It was all PR bull$#!t also, since what really mattered was
1) M$ signed a contract to support Mac Office/IE/OE for the next 5 years.
2) M$ gave Apple an *undisclosed sum of money* as an out of court settlement
3) M$ buys the non-voting stock as a public sign of good will
4) Apple stops prosecuting M$ for copying System 7, and stealing source code from the OS and Quicktime to develop Windows stuff. The third time M$ and Apple came to legal blows over stealing source.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."