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Apple's Rumored Office Suite
Several anonymous readers noted that the mac rumor mill is churning already with news for the upcoming MacWorld. The current rumor is a new office suite to replace the incredibly dated AppleWorks and incredibly bloated and slow MS Office.
Oh no, here come the proles. The tasteless rabble. The masses who see nothing past the price tag. Of course you can't blame them if their trust funds aren't large enough to provide them with life's very finest--they wouldn't appreciate it anyways--but surely Apple should know better than to serve the poor peasants la crème de la vie on the discount rack at Sears.
There was a time, not long ago, when you could tell everything that mattered about a person by his or her choice of operating system. You would notice a man at the local bistro with his titanium PowerBook and a deep garnet Merlot, and you instinctively knew: here is a man with a certain flair, a je ne sais quoi that makes his company worth your while. You'd wonder if the dark-clad woman striding down the street was your type; then you'd notice tucked under her arm a Duo 2300c, so retro and so delicously delicate, and you'd be smitten, simply devastated. You'd go for coffee along Bedford and the two of you would talk about the next East Village gallery opening, or the latest collection from Philippe Starck, or how Frank Lloyd Wright had ruined American architecture.
And it wasn't just about being able to identify like-minded individuals. As a Mac user yourself, you belonged to an exclusive club of discriminating individuals and creative geniuses. Artists like Picasso. Activists like Teresa Heinz. Revolutionaries like Václav Havel. Writers like Dave Eggers. Actresses like Chloë Sevigny. I remember at a cocktail party in SoHo once--it must have been in the mid-'90s--Susan Sontag, Haruki Murakami and I spent hours debating the merits of Mac OS 8's new "Platinum" theme. Those were fine times, indeed.
But ever since the introduction of the mass-produced iMac and iBook, it's been getting harder to distinguish the aesthetically conscious literati from the unwashed masses. It started with the yuppies, and now it's moving on to state-school students and former Dell buyers. On Bedford Avenue, L Café is gone, replaced by a Baby Gap. Soon it will be smelly Linux enthusiasts (ugh!) popping their pimples over translucent keyboards and lickable widgets.
We Mac users were willing to forgive Apple the iPod's popularity, but this... if this rumor is true, then this is going too far. Mon Dieu! Apple, why do you want to sell to these poor peasants? These people don't appreciate beauty and elegance. They don't understand it. They probably even voted for Bush--all four times.
Mr. Jobs, please establish eligibility requirements for the purchase of a new Mac. A good start would be to disqualify anyone who listens to Ashanti or anything they play on K-Rock. You could also disqualify people who think digital watches are cool, as well as all objectivists. In America, don't even bother selling to the lower Midwest. Don't accept applications postmarked from trailer parks. Ban the entire Hilton family.
One way or another, something must be done to preserve the Macintosh community. Anguished but unified, we cry out with one voice. Dam the river, close the gates, pull up the portcullis, keep out the tasteless proles. Please, Mr. Jobs, don't wait until it's too late.
I sure hope their market share increases, so we can start suing them for monopolistic practices! :)
hahaha. Ever since being forced to learn vi, I wonder how any non nerd could ever hope to use it. I was lucky to have 50 of berkeley's finest nerds around to ask questions to (how do I do a global search and replace, how do I form regular expressions, etc). For everyone else, working at non tech companies it was a struggle going from WP to Office in the mid 90's. Even now most people's knowledge of word is pretty rudimentary. I attempted to learn GNU Emacs in the 90's and found that it was colliding with my vi knowledge and soon I would be able to use neither. Emacs seemed even more convoluted than vi was (vi made a wierd sort of sense to me, i could easily remember dl, dw, dd and other such commands since they stood for something.
I forced myself to learn vi so I could edit my usenet kill files. At one point I had a 600 line kill file for rec.music.misc. Ahh the joy of instantly killing depeche mode discographies and spandau ballet discussions was intoxicating. I think I got more joy watching my kill file at work than reading what was left.
music lover since 1969
Well, yeah, but I'm still shocked they didn't report it AGAIN.
What's a sig?
I don't know what you are talking about with that comment. My system, 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 with 3 GB RAM, runs MS Office just fine. I believe that is just above the current hardware requirements of MS Office.
Great ideas often receive violent opposition from mediocre minds. - Albert Einstein
what the fuck is &c.?
I've never seen it before, but assume it's a retard-speak version of etc.?
if so, then please STOP IT RIGHT NOW.
this abomination should go no further.
for fuck's sake it doesn't even save on key presses, assuming you need to use shift for &. and you still put the period after the c in.
what the fuck were you thinking?
just say NO to "teh 1337 sp34k".
I'm sure they're getting to it. Wait until Timothy gets back online.
"Susan Sontag, Haruki Murakami and I spent hours debating the merits of Mac OS 8's new "Platinum" theme. Those were fine times, indeed."
:)
brilliant, just fucking brilliant.
This brings to mind MS's annoying habit of calling things by generic names (Movie Maker, SQL Server, Word, Internet Explorer, Media Player, etc.).
Windows?
" Keynote and Powerpoint make people dumber. I'm too lazy to look up the coresponding Slashdot article."
So you're suffering from an advanced case, huh?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Office for OS X is profitable for MS, so killing it could only be seen as an obvious anti-competitive move by a convicted monopolist.
If they did that, the US Justice Department would be all over them in a heartbeat...
Oh, sorry. Never mind.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
In accordance with the Apple philosophy that Mac hardware and software 'just works', Steve Jobs has announced that iWorks' equivalent of Clippy will actually be relevant, helpful and useful.
You must think in Russian.
As with all rumors, there's no need to believe it until Apple starts taking legal action against the rumor sites. Until then, you can assume that they probably missed the mark.
Well, perhaps holding 'unpopular' opinions makes you feel your are different and special.
You have a syntax error there. You are assigning the property good to MS Office. You should really be using the comparison operator ==
therfore your statement should read: MS Office == good
Just to jump the gun and answer your next question, the value of that expression will be false.
Just like Apple to make things unnecessarily complicated, isn't it? I don't know how many times I've stared at the OS X desktop and said, HUH?! Where's the damn prompt??? ;-)
So what's the shorthand symbol for "phone home"?