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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.
Dated? Maybe! Useful for simple word processing? Absolutely.
I cann't fault it's ability to make a simple hand typed document without bloat, and for that I will continue to use it.
It's about time for a replacement, but I hope the changes made - if the rumor is indeed true - are solid, needed ones rather than an artsy, candied gloss over the previous offering.
A blog like any other.
Who wouldn't welcome a slick, well-integrated, back-to-basics, consumer-grade office suite to come out of Apple?
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
...to replaced the incredibly dated Apple Works and incredibly expensive,bloated and slow MS Office.
I think the submitter has an axe to grind. I have been quite impressed with Word on OSX, and indeed the rest of the available Office suite. I would prefer to use OpenOffice, but I feel it has a little longer to mature on OSX.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
I noticed a piece of Mac shareware just released a new version today. The reason? They are dropping their old "iWork" name for a new one. Veddy interestink.
(Note, the piece of shareware is now titled "iBiz".)
... a better port of OpenOffice? Last I checked (admittedly about a year) there was a working port, but it required installing X11 and a few other "non-Macish" actions before it would work. Could they be better off just "fixing" it ?
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
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.
This rumor seems to make a lot of sense. If Apple were building a new office suite from the ground up it would take a while to do and would explain why AppleWorks say there and played dead for years. Most of the AppleWorks team has probably been working on writing the new office suite and a few people left working on AppleWorks updates and fixes. Also I can see this suite taking a while as Apple would want it to work very intuitively, something that Office frequently fails at and AppleWorks rarely shines at. There are so many formatting options and other tools that to build a really good word processor a complete re-think needs to be done on how the interface is organized. Right now its a nearly endless array of menus and sub-menus. Let's hope Apple does a good job of cleaning up the mess.
People need to realize that making a successful Office competitor doesn't equate to making it less "bloated and slow", or adding any sort of all-important feature set.
The only way any product in this space is going to go places is if it works just like Office, acts just like Office, feels just like Office, etc. Office is the standard, and for 99% of people that use it, it's flawless. Any deviation from this standard suite, even if it's an improvement, is nothing but a nuisance to the average user.
A common user seeing one single glitch (glitch defined as something different from how it works in Office) will run (not walk) to their standard MS Office icons.
How do I know this is true? Simple. There are tons of people who are actually into the OSS movement, love Slashdot, run Linux servers, run OS X, etc. that *still* run MS Office when they can run OpenOffice instead? Why is that? It's because even the most open-minded of us are creatures of habit. And if *these* people are resistant, imagine how the masses are.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
It's not a new office suite, it's an application called Pages that will be bundled in with Keynote to make a new suite of applications called iWork (to complement iLife). There's no word of a spreadsheet application for example.
If the rumour is true (and Think Secret have been very accurate over the past couple of years) then bundling all this software along with the $500 Mac is a great move for them. 1.25Ghz G4 might not sound like much, but it's faster than the last generation iMac I have, and it's already fast enough for the majority of computer users (those who surf, do email, write some letters and take pictures from their digital cameras). Combined with all the software these users are likely to need, it's a great price.
...But Office v.X for the Mac is actually quite nice. I've yet to experience document incompatability problems with MS Office for Windows. For simple documents like research papers and personal writing it does the job reasonably well. Now I haven't written a large thesis with piles of footnotes, or a large book with a huge integrated outline... so it could blow for serious work and I wouldn't know. But the fact is that I need to submit my work in MS word format and it does the job.
Apple may come out with a quality office suite. But if MS Word/Windows users run into even minor incompatability problems with its output, it will fail. I assume the real reason Apple is doing this is because MS may stop supporting MS Office for the Mac. Which would be a real shame. I'm not saying the government should force them to continue supporting the product, but I strongly doubt it's an unprofitable product line. I would certainly buy the next release. Shouldn't shareholders have some say in this? --M
I just upgraded from Office 98 to Office 2004. What a complete waste of money. Aside from OS X code and antialiased fonts, the new version is less stable, slower, crankier, and festooned even more Microsoft User Interface Atrocities than ever. Six years and 3 versions later, Office has failed to fix most (any?) of the annoyances from the 1998 version. I guess near-100% market share means the company does not have to do anything to charge money for its double-speak "upgrades".
Sorry for the rant.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
It is a prefectly free office suite, but not perfectly good. The X version of OpenOffice.org requires the use of Apple's implementation of XFree86, not ideal from Apple's perspective. There is a version (NeoOffice/J) that I use and does not require X, but OpenOffice.org is mostly a copy of Microsoft Office and doesn't do a lot to really give the user a better experience. Yes, OpenOffice.org has tended to behave better than MS Office, but the interface is still filed will too many menus, and worse, too many badly placed menus and menu options. The big problem with office suites is that you have so many options and no one really stopped to think how to organize them, they just threw more and more stuff on the Tools and Format and Edit menus until you couldn't find a damn think you were looking for.
There are really two classes of users that need ``office'' software.
At the low end, you have most home users and students. Most of this group just needs basic wordprocessing and spreadsheet functionality. The most advanced feature would really need to be spellcheck.
At the high end, you have the business users who use a lot of the advanced features like revision tracking, charting, scheduling, etc.
I'm not really sure one suite can cover both audiences.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
Because normal people don't run X11.
When/if they come out with an Aqua-ized version of OO.o, the reason will change to "because Apple believes they can do it better". And I'd give them every chance to try, too.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
If this iWorks isn't 100%--and I mean 100%--compatible with Office, forget it. And is Apple making the right strategic move, here? One of the reasons that folks even contemplate moving from Windows to OS X, instead of, say, Linux, is that you can buy Microsoft Office for OS X.
If MS feels threatened by iWorks, they'll just kill Office for OS X. And then Apple has lost one of their best marketing reasons to go Mac instead of Linux.
Not that Keynote really caused any problems--but iWord is a different story. Maybe this is just so Apple can have a "professional grade" office suite to put on the their pro line, and if you need Office compatibility (like 95% of the world) you buy Office for the Mac? But it would save that other 5% $500.
I guess I don't see the wisdom of this.
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$tar -xvf
If by "from the get-go" you mean when it was still called ClarisWorks, I have to take offense (given that I wrote a lot of it). All the reviewers of the early versions, and millions of users, would disagree with you. In fact there are still lots of things you can do with AppleWorks that you can do with no other single program out there.
That said, by the time the name was changed to AppleWorks, the ball had clearly been dropped, and essentially nothing has been done for the past few years. So, dated - yes. Sucked from the get-go - I think (hope) you have a minority opinion there.
Details on ClarisWorks/AppleWorks history here:
http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/~bob/clarisworks.php/
Bob Hearn
Now if the interface is an absolute paradigm shift that is an order of magnitude more efficient than the mah jhong tiles that define the top of applications in GUI's today AND it runs on Linux?
Then watch out.
Otherwise, people will put up with Office because it is what their company buys, and they don't want to learn 2 word processors/spreadsheet/groupware applications. IE: They will not want to use one application for 99% of what they do every day, and the other one for the Holiday Christmas letter.
...But I digress. TREMBLE PUNY HUMANS!ONE DAY MY SPECIES WILL DESTROY YOU ALL!
They reported that on Dec 29th.
Think Secret Predicts Sub-$500 Headless Mac
Posted by timothy on Wednesday December 29, @07:03AM
The MacOS version requires XFree86 to run and work has slowed on the Aqua and Quartz tracks.
I'm quite certain that should this rumored office suite actually come to market that it will not require XF86 to run. This should please the average Mac user that finds the current OOo interface terrible looking, not to mention very interesting to use.
Don't get me wrong, I use OOo and am happy for it. I hope to help the porting along as much as I can. Right now, it's still scary for most (Mac) people.
Slashdot's Apple section: Rumors for Nerds. Speculation that matters.
That OperOffice.org runs under X11 on OS X is enough reason not to use it for 98% of the people out there. It can't even use native menus and widgets, for Pete's sake.
I love that I can run The GIMP and friends through X11 on my Mac, but there's no way in hell I'd call it "perfectly good". X11 on Mac is adequate--enough to get the job done, but little more than that. I'll take native apps over X11 any day of the week.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
I would like to see what new features this includes when compared to MS Office or OpenOffice.
Hopefully this will create more competition between these office suites and bring about new features to Office market.
Hopefully Apple will try to use some open standards
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
Even less bloat and unlike Appleworks and it comes with all copies of OS X.
Apple's new word processing software had been rumored to be called Document, but sources say it appears that name has been abandoned, possibly due to the confusion a user might encounter when being told "this document is a Document document."
:)
This brings to mind MS's annoying habit of calling things by generic names (Movie Maker, SQL Server, Word, Internet Explorer, Media Player, etc.). I wish they'd knock it off... it can really screw up a Google search, both for MS and non-MS products. They should stick with names like Excel and Powerpoint, and Apple should not pick up this habit. Call it iWriter or something. Hell, why not OOWriter
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
Well, yeah, but I'm still shocked they didn't report it AGAIN.
What's a sig?
Other replies to the parent identify the significant issues with OO on the Mac. Having tried for a year to rely on it for word processing, I finally gave up and switched to Mellel--a fine tool for a number of things, but not nearly as muscular as either OO or MS-O. The poor shell integration and reliance on X caused more frustration for me than using it was worth.
That said, OO is a fine product in it's Win and Lin incarnations, and I personally would prefer Apple to fully fund a team dedicated to properly porting the darn thing to Aqua, as opposed to rolling their own from scratch. There is a somewhat beleaguered dev trying to do the job, but they need lots of help. Some developers and cash would make their lives a lot easier.
A funded porting team would also benefit from being able to use the work of the OO core team in dealing with the always-vexing "catch up" issues such as managing the MS format changes, in turn letting the port team focus on making the OO updates play nice in Aqua. Less work for them, quicker updates for the user community.
(Not that Steve gives an expresso shot for what I think, but, hey, I can hope... )
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
Apple could do everyone (including Microsoft) a favor by concentrating their effort solely on components that read/write/render MS Office and Mac Works file formats in OpenOffice.org, and distributing OO.o with every Mac. Macs could become the preferred authoring platforms for every medium, extending their audio/video dominance into the office, for consumption by the vast masses downstream running Windows and Linux.
--
make install -not war
I'm sure they're getting to it. Wait until Timothy gets back online.
I'd be happy if they kept TextEdit, but created an app along these lines:
Simple Interface
Compatible file formats (Text Edit does to this)
A slightly more robust UI (default-on Fonts window, etc)
Support for tables and graphics.
I already use TextEdit for 50% or more of my writing (basically all but academic papers), and if they could keep the simplicity while making it a bit more similar to most people's experience with Word (keep the 20% of features that end up in 99% of the documents), I'd use it for 100% of my documents.
I've also tried the X11 OpenOffice, and a native port to OSX would be nice. that said, having the Windows-centric keystrokes blows.
C'mon, Apple, you can do it!
Powerpoint compatibility is diabolical, because it's native tables and graphics are rubbish, so it constantly embeds foreign application documents on the Windows side that cannot be displayed on the Mac. In the other direction, God forbid you actually paste a screenshot in, because it will be a compressed TIFF, and when that gets back to Powerpoint for Windows it will not only fail to display it, but will actively hard-replace it with a graphic of a broken red X.
Office v.X on the Mac cannot do html round-tripping. So for anyone who prefers to store files as html like I do (for easier style sheet editing - die wysiwig die - and for post processing and export), you are screwed. The html format is not interoperable between the two either, information is lost here as well.
Well, page numbers would be nice, too. And real control over your margins. And footnotes. And mail merge. And maybe headers and footers. Multi-columns would be nice. Okay, so maybe it needs *just* a bit more than tables. But tables would be nice, too.
ScienceSeeker.org
Word for OS X isn't slow until you use it to open big complex documents (the ones that TextEdit won't open correctly because they have lots of tables, footnotes, images, a table of contents, etc.). Documents like that barely scroll on my ancient and revered dual 450 MHz G4.
And when they do scroll, they cause Word to crash, about once a day. Makes me feel like I'm running Windows 98 again, except I don't have to reboot afterwards.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I think embracing and extending Open Office (or even open-sourcing their custom app) would be a better move for Apple. Right now, it is difficult for many businesses to replace PCs with Macs because of Office. The Office version for Mac is more limitted and has some performance and interoperability problems. The only way Apple could break that monoploly would be to release a competing office suite (preferably for free) that runs well on Windows, Linux, and Mac.
The real advantage to that would be to make a Mac the logical upgrade for businesses. They are not a software company, and software is a difficult place to build value right now. Keep the software open, and sell the hardware.
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
Awhile ago, Apple re-hired much of the team from Gobe, creators of the amazing app Productive for BeOS. Productive was the most tightly-integrated, easy to use, and fast office suite I've ever had the joy to use.
The team that created Productive was also the team behind the original ClarisWorks on the Mac, which too was an amazing feat of integration in a small footprint. Then a different coding team took over, it became AppleWorks, and began to suck royally.
If the team behind Productive is the team behind this rumored office suite, it is going to be one sweet Suite! HA HA HA HA. Seriously, though, they are masters of the art.
I have been trying out the beta version of NeoOffice/J, which is based on OpenOffice 1.1.3, and have found it to be much nicer than the X11 version of OpenOffice.
The main downside is that it is somewhat sluggish on my G4 Powerbook being written in Java (using the Carbon interface). But having access to all of my fonts, and better rendering make up for any speed issues I have noticed.
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.
Absolutely!!! When ClarisWorks came out, I was at a major university. This application was awesome and incredibly useful not only for students with new computers, but I remember refurbishing many older Macs that people had been pretty much throwing away (or selling for like $50). An old SE Mac and ClarisWorks was pretty cheap and worked very well for students to use in their own rooms instead of fighting for access in the labs. The thought that you could run that puppy off a floppy disk was truly amazing...it was damn efficient code and contained unique features - many still not found elsewhere. Unfortunately it *is* incredibly dated. For those who can't relate to software age in years, you could put it this way...the last time AppleWorks was updated was just after the last major update to Windows! That's friggin' embarrassing.
If Apple also comes on board, this would help a lot in creating a true office standard-format (for the first time in computing history, until now we just have fluctuating quasi-standards set by whatever version of whatever office suite happens to be in the most widest use) benefit everybody except Microsoft.
I will be able to read OASIS-documents in 20 years, but I have my doubts about MSOffice documents...
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.
Although I think you're serious, I really thought your post was sarcastic at first. Access sucks, sucks, sucks. Its slow and doesn't play well with others.
PCs are in every way superior? Faster? Debateable, it seems the same chip that runs on my desktop is used to build one of the worlds more powerful clusters with one of the highest computing scores per processor. Stronger? When's the last time my OS X box was victim to a worm or virus? Oh, right, never. (If you're running Linux maybe you can say the same thing, but then I guess the machines are equally strong.) Cheaper? Some are, some aren't. Apple has a higher initial price point, but similarly configured PCs are pretty closely price to Macs.
As to the choice of UNIX, by your argument Apple could have picked any core. Picking an OS core isn't something you do for marketing reasons, you make Aqua pretty for marketing. The main reason UNIX was picked was for stability and extensibility. With a clean code base Apple has been able to rapidly pump out an array of applications because they've been able to build powerful frameworks that can be used over and over.
I taught word processing and basic PC skills to paralegals in the 90's. In spite of Word's increasing popularity, many law offices stayed with WordPerfect. Here's what I saw happen:
Law offices adopted WordPerfect because its style sheets and macro features matured before Word's. In a business that produces massive numbers of identically-formatted documents, with many passages repeated from doc-to-doc, robust stylesheets and macros were a powerful selling point.
WordPerfect's keystroke shortcuts were also critical to its success in the law field. Most of the typing in law offices was done by secretaries, who were professional typists. They didn't want thier fingers to leave the keyboard for any reason. And they certainly didn't want to have to wait for a menu to pop up or pull down, and then navigate through that menu (even if they could do so without leaving the keyboard). WordPerfect enabled these professional typists to do everything with keyboard shortcuts only, and bypass slower menus. WordPerfect was to legal secretaries what emacs is to programmers.
Third-party vendors saw the dominance of WordPerfect in the legal profession, and developed thier products around WordPerfect. Whether it was an add-on to produce legal citations more easily, or templates for legal documents, they further supported WordPerfect's dominance in this specialized market.
After spending years developing thier WordPerfect reflexes, integrating third party products, and even writing thier own WordPerfect macros, legal typists were not going to easily abandon the application. So while most of the rest of the world switched to Word, the legal profession has kept on chugging away with WordPerfect. And now every lawyer I know still uses it.
User Training for Busy Programmers
I agree that Apple should be as open as possible.
Regardless of the direction Apple takes on this, open document standards are the most important consideration. I hope they are looking at Open Office or OASIS or any means of ridding us of the cursed concept of some big company having more rights with my data than I do.
I want to send my document to anyone I choose, and know that the recipient will easily work with my document, regardless of the machine or software that they are using.
I want to move between machines at home and work and in between in any of their modes, and still be abled to edit the document.
I want to know that the arrangement of bits and bytes are still useful as long as my data is useful
Business, individuals, the computer industry, everyone should benefit from changing to a document centred world from the current application centred world.
A bold move in that direction will help me to favor a shiny new Mac in a clamshell, when this machine goes belly up (hopefully no time soon). My workstatation/server will probably remain Linux.
The killer-app is dead.
The killer-doc must rule the new information era.
Long live the killer-doc!
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.
But that's the wrong way to go. Microsoft, Apple, and other vendors need to figure out how to create software platforms that allow good integration between applications that weren't developed by a single team. And none of them have managed that yet.
True integration requires open, flexible standards for content and inter-application communications. Nobody has really figured out how to do that yet, least of all Microsoft and Apple.
This is a good point. Apple developed something called OpenDoc, which consisted of object-oriented documents with plug-in replaceable reader and content generator code. That way, if you didn't like the text editor, you simply bought another that worked the way you wished. BBEdit had a module that replaced the one Apple shipped. IIRC, ODoc was killed in a MS-Apple deal that left Office running on Macs...
This line no sig
Here's how Apple could be successful even without MS Office
If the rumors about a robust Apple office suite are true, and I'm pretending I'm Steve Jobs, I'm guessing Apple will continue to work in and around the OS community as IBM has done (and Apple has already done so far).
Apple has learned quite a bit about the open source community by now, after their experiences with Darwin/Mac OS X and KHTML/Safari. The use of open standards is prevalent throughout the bundled applications (Mail -> mbox; Address Book -> vcard; iCal -> icalendar, etc.). Apple should continue this trend with their office suite.
Make the interface irresistible. They have already shown how to do it with ClarisWorks (I never used AppleWorks, but CW 4 was a thing of integrated beauty). They have shown the ability to put great power in simple packages. iTunes. Garage Band. iPhoto. Personally, I have never liked Word's interface (even on the Mac), but there's not a lot of choice. Bring on a contender with a fresh face, and Word's 20-year-old baggage (elements from 1984 are still there -- where's the fscking Font menu!?) will suddenly look very ugly.
Read Word documents reasonably well. Write them perfectly. All translation leaves something to be desired. I don't believe that it is necessary for a Word contender to be 100% feature compatible with Word. It absolutely needs to get styles, sections, margins, tables, footnotes, endnotes, and graphics right, though. A spreadsheet program needs to duplicate the function set of Excel (though not necessarily the syntax; q.v.) It needs to be 100% right for the features that 80% of the people use. Word won not because of its interface, but because people are locked into its format. Break the format and you break the biggest barrier to alternate office contenders. Perhaps this will require work with Open Office developers. That substep should happen no matter what, if only for the following point.
Make the format an open standard. Let anyone write an app to read or write Apple Office documents. This is the corollary to the point above. Don't give people reasons to fear switching to or from your app. Give them the ability to change their mind. That's a feature; people will buy it.
Don't imitate Office Seriously. Do something new. Give people a jump start on new ideas and possibilities. Make everything wiki-like. Docs on the network should be sharable. Build a Subversion repository into every document or home folder.Extend it to every OS X server. Build on the embeddable parts idea from OpenDoc (and semi-executed in CW). Instead of a spreadsheet program, build a full-featured spreadsheet on top of a robust, professional RAD environment with an open API. Let regular people be developers again (whatever happened to HyperCard?).
Buy Omni Group. Or take notes. Or just give them money to continue developing fantastic software. OmniWeb, OmniOutliner, and OmniGraffle are all head-of-class programs. Graffle could easily be part of an Office Pro suite. Especially if you can build and take snapshots of SQL tables like Visio.
IBM is building its business on enterprise open source software like Linux. Apple should continue the progress they have made in the direction of doing the same for personal computing apps.
Et cetera, often abbreviated to etc., and sometimes in older texts as &c. or &/c. It is often used to represent the logical continuation of some sort of series of descriptions. For example:
We need a lot of fruit: apples, bananas, oranges, etc.
It is important to avoid the phrase "and etc." because then you are saying "and and the others".
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It wouldn't feel indistinguishable from Cocoa. We've had this debate about Firefox many times. Firefox is the highest quality of app you could expect from that sort of approach - and many Mac users (me included) do not use it because it doesn't 'feel' mac-like.
Any emulating of the native widgets will bring in slight differences that users aren't always aware of consciously (unless they know the OS very well), but will annoy them with the inconsistency. For example, when I press a key I expect my mouse pointer to disappear - that's a system standard. But many apps that weren't written using Apple's frameworks don't do that.
Also, if you just have a translating layer (I'm envisioning something akin to the Aqua look for Java Swing), you'll end up with Aqua controls all clumped up because the positioning wasn't taken into account. Or you'll end up with the preferences option under the Edit menu, because other OSs don't have an app-name menu.
In general, Mac users are far more picky about these things. That's why breaking into the Mac market is hard if you don't put the effort into understanding the philosophy behind the interface. Anyone can do a port of a Windows or X11 app, switching the menus to appear Aqua and changing nothing else - but few Mac users will tolerate it. We require inter-app consistency much more than we do inter-platform consistency within one app. Even Adobe gets slated for some poor interface options in Photoshop that are too geared to the Windows crowd!
An app like Camino is an excellent example. Gecko for rendering (a cross platform library) but a Mac-specific interface. Adium uses gaim as a base library, and adds a Mac interface. These projects work. But when you attempt to port an existing interface, your work will NOT be well received!