Microsoft's Mac Business Unit

An anonymous reader writes "Today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an interesting piece on the folks who work at the Mac Business Unit for Microsoft."

Comments

Re:Office for Mac

[mccalli]

With Office for Mac development discontinued,...

False

...[i]t needs some sort of MS Office replacement, which at the moment it doesn't have.

True, at least in my opinion. Appleworks is stagnant, and hasn't even integrated some standard OS X features yet. Realtime spell-checking comes to mind, I'm fairly sure I was doing that using 1st Word Plus on an 8Mhz Atari ST 512k more than ten years ago...

Cheers,
Ian

Re:GM to VW as Mac to Linux

[kfg]

The only problem is that that statement belies a complete ignorance of the economics and corporate ties of the auto industry.

GM, Ford, Volkswagon, Honda, Toyota, etc, all make parts for "competitors."

It's called doing business and making a profit. What does GM care if the motor they're making money on has someone elses label on the hood?

What does Microsoft care if office is running on a Mac as long as they get the same cut they would if it were running under Windows?

Either way they derive profit, market share and mind share.

KFG

Why would they NOT have Macs?

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

I have no idea why the parent is "funny". Everyone knows Microsoft makes Mac software, and without question, they have labs that have everything from Macs to vanilla Linux machines, Sparc Stations and everything else. Any company that does not investigate it's competition is beyond ignorent. People cut Microsoft a lot, but stupid people they are not.

Scary quote

[brucmack]

From the article: ...they recounted with pride such tales as the colleague who broke up with a girlfriend who bought a Windows PC.

This kind of statement really doesn't help the Mac cause... To a non-Mac user, it freaks me out, to tell you the truth. It seems too cult for my tastes.

Re:MSoffice on Mac is STILL second rate

[ducomputergeek]

Oddly enough, I love MS Office on Mac better than windows and I beta tested Office 2000 and XP. To our small business, the lack of access is mute. We run 95% macs, with BSD or Linux on our servers. I refuse to use Access and run either PostgreSQL or MySQL that handles all of our CRM/ERP. But that's overkill really. We get buy with Mac Mail and Quickbooks Pro quite nicely. We have less than 10 employees, but when things like MyDoom come along we don't worry about it.

Also, even if Office goes away for Mac I don't think its going to be much a problem. OpenOffice is making great strides, I have had several clients switch to OpenOffice and save thousands of dollars as opposed to going to Office 2003. Most of my clients don't need anything other than a word processor and spread sheet on most of their desktops.

On the other note, of my clients, the video production folks are buying macs in droves and spending an average of $7000 a peice for them. Why? Final Cut Pro is the defacto small shop editing software for video production companies. Even major motion pictures are being edited on the machines and that market's not going away so long as Apple continues producing excellent software.

Furthermore, there is something going on your not reading about much: The rest of the world is going to LINUX as their OS of choice. Microsoft maybe able to bribe some back to their side, but largely, I think the desktop market over the next five years outside of the United States is going to Linux. I also see some larger companies going to Linux as well as soon as a clear defacto desktop enviroment emerges.

Discovered this while working and studying in Germany. The german college I attended for a semester had two Linux labs and one Windows XP lab. The students spent more time usually typing up papers in StarOffice on SuSE Linux than in MS office and Windows.

Mac and BSD dying threads just aren't true. I switched myself from Linux to Mac about two years ago and never looked back. So far I have been very impressed with my iBook and now Powerbook.