Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft to Continue Office on Mac
LiMikeTnux wrote to mention a CNN article giving details about the five year agreement now in place between Microsoft and Apple to keep Office alive on the Mac platform. From the article: "Though Apple clearly benefits from having the widely-used Office software available to its users, it may seem less obvious what Microsoft stands to gain from continuing its relationship. But according to Greg DeMichillie, a senior analyst with Directions on Microsoft, an independent consulting and analysis firm focusing specifically on Microsoft, the business is still a profitable one for Microsoft. While it's not a huge part of Microsoft's business, given the company's sheer scale, 'Apple's 3 to 4 percent market share doesn't hurt them either,' DeMichillie said. 'Also, to have them be seen going out of their way to hurt a competing operating system is not really helpful from an anti-trust perspective.'"
Ok, so it's true that they're allowing people to use Apple laptops and computers while still receiving the benefit of Microsoft's Office Suite. But let's consider that the average Apple user just plain doesn't like Windows. Sure, there's some people running both Windows and OSX in their homes right now but I'm guessing that's pretty rare. I would say these users are about as polarized as the last U.S. presidential election.
So Microsoft is still charging a lot of money for this software so it's not like they're taking a profit hit or just handing this out.
On top of that, they may be quashing any possibility of an Apple user being forced to seek alternatives. What I mean is that, without this alternative, Microsoft Office fans (who are also Apple operating system advocates) would be forced to look for an alternative. Maybe even a free open source alternative such as OpenOffice.org or selecting other free word editors?
I see this as a smart move for Microsoft in that it allows them to still maintain a dominant control on these people for publishing suites even though they might have lost them on the operating system level.
Furthermore, I don't think it's fair to compare Office on the Mac with Explorer on the Mac. There are a large amount of benefits that Microsoft Explorer gains from staying on top as the number one used browser. One of them being that Microsoft gains more clout in determining standards for webpages and the communications through the internet.
Now, back to the original article, who the hell is Directions on Microsoft? And, more importantly, what do they have to gain from authoring and publishing Microsoft's Top 10 Challenges for 2006?
If you check out their About Us page, they seem to paint themselves as a resource in understanding the greatness that is Microsoft. I know this is just speculation but I smell Microsoft cooking up a website devoted to thrusting themselves even further into the limelight (since 1992). If this site was a little less biased, I'd be inclined to enjoy it.
My work here is dung.
Don't forget that if you're a college student or work at a college or university, you can often get a license for Office X very cheaply. The school that I work at offers it for just a few dollars. Check with your college bookstore or computer store before shelling out big bucks.
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
Office 2004 for OS X is light years better than Office 2003 for Windows.
Tons of the features in 2004 are showing up in other products for MS, like OneNote, Project etc. The only thing keeping Entourage from being better than Outlook by leaps and bounds is MS's intentional crippling of Entourage as an Exchange client.
Perhaps MS uses OS X for advanced products beta testing?
This
Isn't the whole point of having a Mac to not be using Microsoft products? It's kind of like browsing the 'Net with IE for Mac. Counter-intuitive if you ask me.
Jobs announced this in his keynote.
What microsoft mostly gets is not starting a move to an open office standard by all Mac users
Yet Windows Media Player and MSIE will no longer be offered... interesting... The MS representative at Macworld was trying to show that they are "in for the long haul" but they're backing out at the same time. Doesn't matter much to me, I hate WMP, MSIE and Office 2004. I wish they would leave Apple alone altogether then maybe apple would release the rest of their iWork suite (that I'm sure is finished but waiting to release until MS pulls out).
Microsoft's announcement explains why we haven't seen the rumored "Numbers" spreadsheet app added iWork yet. It's being worked on for sure - we know Apple is happy to keep teams working on "just in case" projects, like they way they've had an OS X on Intel team working for the last 5 years. So part of the deal is probably that Apple keeps Numbers on the backburner for now, but having it ready to go probably helps Apple negotiate. And for now, having office available on the Mac is better for everyone.
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
Too many features have been intentionally not supported by Microsoft where Entourage is concerned. Distribution lists cannot be used on Entourage unless created locally (forget about someone sending this to you from a Windows box). According to MS the work around for everything is webmail.
Why bother using Entourage at all when only basic functions are supported.
Where is Visio, Publisher for Mac? These sort of things encourage people to switch to Windows. Could be the motivation?
In short, MS does not fully support Office for Mac currently, why does this 5 year agreement mean anything?
Is it time for me to give NeoOfficeJ a serious consideration? I hate the speed at which NeoOfficeJ handles presentation slides!
Another benefit for MS is a "not so bad after all" image. If they dropped support people would loathe MS even more for not supporting their system which used to work always fine with Office. They probably gain not much financially but get some positive feelings. Maybe.
Of course, I think the most important aspect of this deal is that if Microsoft stops making office software for the Mac, then even the most Windows hardened of the IT guys is gonna have to learn about the alternatives available. Macs are deployed in a great many IT environments (cuz the Graphics people love em, for one thing), alongside a 95% windows operation. If there's no Mac Office, then Office Documents can no longer be a perfect "standard", like most of the IT guys consider them now. Suddenly, compatability will be a concern for even the most timid Windows-junkie Administrator, and Microsoft would soon be facing an even greater pressure to provide some semblance of interoperability. I think this move is much more about protecting Office as a "standard" than it is about the profit (which is probably not a great amount when weighed against Apple's competition in the Desktop OS market).
Numbers is kind of there - just hidden. You can add tables to either Pages or Keynote documents that support calculations now.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Software companies like to sell software to people with computers.
But they leave Office
"The Lord Giveth, and the lord taketh away"
Many large organizations (say, with tens of thousands of desktops) are cross-platform, e.g. with mostly PCs running Microsoft Windows with a few Apple macintosh systems scattered around for graphic design.
They use Microsoft Office everywhere because then all their users can edit documents.
Of course, all here doesn't always include Unix users, and those people sometimes have two desktop computers.
If Microsoft were to drop support for the Mac, a lot of large organizations would consider switching to OpenOffice (or StarOffice, or some other solution).
When I worked at a software company that made SGML software some 10 years ago, we could sell 30,000 desktop licences to someone only because 300 of those would be able to run on the Macintosh (the others were HP/UX and Windows). They required cross-platform support on everything.
Live barefoot!
free engravings/woodcuts
this agreement was speculated to be part of a settlement between microsoft and apple. Aplle had microsoft on a patent violation and they made a settlement out of court and quite secretively. This initial agreement was speculated to be part of the agreement,.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
iWork is gaining steam, is it possible that by continuing to run MSOffice on the Mac they are encouraging continued development of iWork and eventually going to end up with another competetor in the Windows office suite arena?
OR have they they changed their mind and decided that they need Office to get along with other platforms and office suites in order to remain competetive?
Are either of these possible?
aoeu
While its nice to have word and excel, there are a few things missing like access, viiso, project. Just enough missing components to still need to run a windows desktop in most companies.
More like a 'teaser' than real support.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
keeps Kollar-Kotelly away.
... obtaining format specifications for all office documents from Microsoft and building/updating their own products to be able to seamlessly edit and save MS documents. Office 12 formats are already open for Apple and Pages and Keynote already have a decent Word/PPT import function. That means they just need to perfect Pages/Keynote in terms of being able to Read/Write Word and PPT docs and adding a spreadsheet application that can do the same thing for Excel documents. IMHO It would be a mistake in the long run relying on MS to provide a significant product such as Office suite given MS's history.
Heck even if Apple put resources on NeoOffice/J and brought it up to speed - that would be a good move.
There is likely buried in this "agreement" some surreptitious non-compete language, covering any number of scenrios - and I doubt we'll see this full agreement in writing, ever ;-)
Office 13 will probably be released in 2008/9 - so should be within this 5 year contract. Does this mean that MS wil be porting .NET to OS X?
Office 2004 for OS X is light years better than Office 2003 for Windows.
You have to be kidding, right?
I use OS X and Windows at work, and use Office on both platform. Office on OS X is terrible. It's slow. It's ugly... and it doesn't even perform properly (why should I have to resize a window to force it to redraw so I can see the document I'm working on? and yes, I'm using the latest versions of OS X and of Office2004).
Office is still one place where Windows rules.
I truly cannot wait until OpenOffice.org is OS X-native... iWork just doesn't cut it, and the bastardized X11 version of OOo on OS X leaves me cold.
I'm both a Windows user and a Mac OS X user. I'm a manager of a technical group, and so I use things like word processing and spreadsheets quite a bit.
I'm not a "power user", in the sense that I don't manage a 50 million dollar budget, nor do I write books. I'll create charts, presentations, and internal memos and documentation.
My experience? MS-Office stinks on BOTH platforms.
1. It's bloated. There are so many features to wade through, adding something simple like a chart or a footnote takes an inordinate amount of work. It isn't hard, it's just tedious.
2. Crashes. I find that Office crashes more frequently than any other software I use. It crashes more than Windows, more than lots of free software, more than everything. Thankfully, the autosave feature is somewhat effective in saving me a lot of rework.
3. Compatibility. I find MS-Office makes poor choices when dealing with different versions of MS-Office. A lot of users aren't running the latest Microsoft office... and therefore, a lot of people have issues dealing with documents created with other versions. No wonder why Massachusetts wants to drop the MS-Office file format - I find that it's a huge moving target that can't even manage itself.
4. Piggy. MS-Office seems to suck down all my CPU. So what? Well, I use a laptop, and the more CPU that baby sucks down, the less computing time I have. Flying from coast to coast? I find running MS-office sucks down my battery juice faster than most similar apps.
I fully believe that Microsoft has become lazy in terms of making a good office application. The lack of competition means that office-class apps have stopped in terms of innovation. I agree that MS-Office has many features, but for me, I'd rather have a lighter-weight applications than what I've got now.
Office 2004 Student and Teacher edition also sells for very cheap. You get 3 licenses for $149.
Office is just as important to MS, if not more so, than Windows is. Buisinesses might have Linux webservers or Oracle database servers but they all use Microsoft Office with very few exceptions. It is the software that actually gets the real work done, and the document formats that everybody writes that work to exchange them in, and it is a larger and more important monopoly for them in the long term.
Now Microsoft has a dilemma - do they ensure the survival of Office by making it availible on platforms like Linux to ensure it can run on every desktop or do they force you to stay on their platform by making that the only way to run it? So far they have choen to not lend legitimacy to Linux as a desktop platform and it has not hurt them very much. However, OSX is a much more appealing desktop, one that is gaining in popularity, and Microsoft chose to support it to keep the people who chose it using Office.
I think that the current balance that MS is striking between supporting their platform and supporting Office also the Mac as a second platform is working for them and to their benefit. The last thing they want is for all the Mac users to turn to another office platform - especially one that has a windows version and/or is less expensive - that they could evangelicly convert their friends and family to. People stay with Office because it is the easy and safe choice and it actually is a good product that does most of what they want and need. The most important thing that Office has, though, is it's ubiquity - and so far they have managed to be able to keep that and it is well worth what they pay to port Office to the Mac.
I think that if Linux gains enough popularity where it is 10-15% of worldwide desktops in countries that can afford Office you'll see them port it to that too...
Office on the Mac isn't truly compatible with Office on the PC. Case in point, I had to give a presentation using PowerPoint (from Office 2004). Unfortunately, we were not allowed to bring in our own laptops, so I had to use the provided PC running Office XP and hooked up to the projector. The bullet points (selected from a template, nothing special) were not only missing, but foreign characters left completely blank spaces in the words and names. Now I was told in the past that Office 2004 is a catch-up port of Office XP, yet with all of the talk from MS about 2004 having features not found on the Windows version, it's not even compatible with its own family of Office products.
Microsoft doesn't want to lose its most talented developers. Seriously, just compare the mac office to the windows office....its night and day.
These past few days, my employer has failed to utilize me sufficiently; therefore, I focused some effort on Slashdot.
...
My goal was to gain moderator status in two days. I guess I've failed.
I've constructed a Dr. Suess quote that culminates the results of my findings over the past two days:
The only dogs
Who get to have mods
Are the dogs
Who slobber CowboyNeal's knob.
I appreciate your comments on my writing ability but I warn you that I am but a stupid farmer boy who wandered into the city one fateful day
My work here is dung.
History could repeat itself. If Microsoft abandons the Mac, the product that replaces it might be good enough to establish a beachhead there and eventually challenge Office for Windows, one of Microsoft's biggest cash cows. In that context, keeping the profitable Mac Business Unit going is free insurance.
Now if Microsoft would just set up a group within the Mac-loving Mac BU to develop and maintain a version of Vista for the Mac. It makes perfect sense. The copies of Vista they sell would almost pure profit and, given the small size of the Mac product line, they're likely to be the most stable version of Vista on the market.
I know an InDesign instructor who'd be absolutely delighted. He could buy easily transported Intel iMacs and use them to teach InDesign for both OS X and Windows. And I'd get it to maintain the books I have in FrameMaker. Whether you like or hate Microsoft, Vista for Intel Macs would be a win-win situation for everyone.
--Mike Perry, Untangling Tolkien
The only explanation that I can see is that they got some sort of concession out of Apple in exchange for the commitment.
I suspect that the concession from Apple was to not actively support OpenOffice. Maybe they offered in exchange for help (that I don't think they need) to get VirtualPC working on the new Intel Macs. But I'd welcome more informed speculation.
Office has a 5 year additional life on the Mac, but MSIE and Windows Media Player are terminated, including the support. Which, IMO, is good news. WMP is not good, navigates poorly on DVDs, and v9 and 10 cause random freezes and even crashes on WinXP PRO. At least on two (different) laptops I have. I've had to stop using it for DVDs.
Its great that most macros work independent of operating system. But the debugging environment is far superior on Office for Windows (variable watches, etc). Also, there are some odd differences in a few places (FileFind vs. FileSearch, for instance) that can be accounted for but don't seem necessary on the surface.
"Open the pod by doors, Hal" > "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" sudo "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" > alright
I myself have to be reminded of this point now and then, so perhaps it's worth mentioning:
One of the most longtime supporters of Apple, and one of the most loyal (and by loyal I mean "did not bail when Apple's star was dimming at various times in the past") is, oddly, Microsoft. They have quietly kept a large selection of their products supported on the Macs over the years, even when other software companies were ditching Apple for the growing green pasturues of the Windows world.
Now, I can already hear guns being cocked, so let me be clear as to how I intend all this: we should not percieve announcements such as being discussed above as being some new drive for MS. Instead, it is actually, pretty much, more of the same type of thing they have been doing for a very long time. As for their reasons, plans, or evil coniving - couldn't tell ya, and that isn't the point of what I mention. But Microsoft, for decades, has made many of it's bits of software available on Apple computers (perhaps the plural on decade is a bit of a stretch, but you get what I mean.)
They already have ... it's called ROTOR (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?F amilyId=3A1C93FA-7462-47D0-8E56-8DD34C6292F0&displ aylang=en) and works on FreeBSD as well.
Incidentally, if you examine Office, you will find that they also ported the entire COM runtime to the Mac to allow the VBA to work.
There's another reason for continuing to produce Mac versions of Office, which is that this market usually pays full retail. In the Windows/Linux world, it either comes preinstalled, or you steal it, which is to say, borrow it from your pals or at work. Since it is so ubiquitous, it's easy to find copies. When Linux was my sole desktop, I always had "borrowed" copies of office running on crossover office, for when openoffice.org compatibility wasn't good enough, or when I had to look at some access database. I don't have it on my Mac laptop, because I would have to pay handsomely for it.
Since Bill Gates himself, as recently as 2005, publicly stated that Office for the Mac is a profitable business for Microsoft, it's hard to imagine why anyone on earth would think that they would discontinue development of it for any reason, let alone because of the Intel switch.
But it gives us a brief moment to pause and consider the practical meaning to the repeated reference to Apple's "tiny" market share, in so much as it is a negative reflection on Apple. Why would anyone want to develop for it? I think people tend to forget that even 5 percent (or whatever the exact number is reported to be these days) still translates in real terms to millions of active users. Any company, such as Microsoft, which can sell products directly to a customer base of millions of credit card carrying customers would be foolish to turn the prospect down, something that someone such as Gates, CEO of the largest software company in the world, clearly understands.
If you're a student and your university is part of the Microsoft Academic Alliance, you can get a copy of any Microsoft OS from Win 98 on (including NOSes) for free. YOu can also get a bunch of other cool software for free. It's a useful service.
How to use coral cache: http://slashdot.org.nyud.net:8090/~oscartheduck
The girl I'm most involved with at the moment noticed my 12" PowerBook and used it as an excuse to get to know me.
Perhaps you should stop being involved with girls who play dumb to get attention.
About $500 per copy sold
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Your Seuss style quote is spot on.
And the "slobber CowboyNeal's knob" you refer to is known as MetaModerating. You might want to go do some.
Given recent announcements from Apple, hasn't the job of keeping up Office on Mac become rather simpler? Microsoft do have some experience with x86 architectures, after all..
And, given that OSX is basically a unix, soon to be seen on x86 hardware, will this make it easier to install and run Office for Mac on other x86 *nixes? Naturally, a significant number of *nix users would decline that on principal, but should Codeweavers be worried?
I stopped by the Microsoft booth during MacWorld and asked when support for the Intel Macs would appear. They (experts at the main Office help desk) said that there wouldn't be a MacTel native version until next version of Office is released (i.e. they won't be translating Office 2004 to Universal Binary).
Office will still run on the new Macs under Rosetta, but there could be quite a performance hit. I'm having enough problems with Office running native on my PowerBook as is (strange hangs, etc.). I can only imagine how horrible it could be if, for instance, there are delays in typing.
When I asked if the next version had an expected relase date, they shrugged their shoulders and said, "A year? Maybe two?"
What a pain if we have to wait two years for native MacTel support for Office!
The plural on decade is precisely accurate. I bought MS Word 1.0 for Mac in 1984, and never used the toy called MacWrite again.
Disclaimer: I am an OpenOffice.org developer and a NeoOffice founder.
There are a number of tricks with which you may be able to improve presentation performance. First off, try 1.2 Beta. Older versions of NeoOffice/J were based on Java 1.3. Apple's virtual machine was buggy, so to implement drawing properly we needed to use triple buffering. With NeoOffice 1.2, we're using Java 1.4 and can access drawing buffers directly without working around bugs Apple never fixed in earlier VM versions.
Another thing to keep in mind is that you can always improve speed if you avoid transitions and animations in your presentation. Various funky cube wipes/dissolves add nothing to the content of presentations and just waste everyone's time and (I daresay) distract from the actual content. Folks should focus on what a bullet point actually *says*, not whether it flies in from the right, iris dissolves, or whatever. Sorry if it seems like a rant, but animations really are frills and should be used sparingly. In most every presentation using them, the "transition effects" actually detract from the content instead of providing meaningful information.
I've used NeoOffice and OOo X11 for presentations off of a 400MHz TiBook for years at O'Reilly conferences, business conferences, and others. If someone complains that their presentations run slowly, the first thing that runs through my mind is that it's not the type of presentation I want to be sitting through. Give me an overhead projector with transparancies anyday over something with sound effects and transitions that'll trigger seizures :D
ed
'Also, to have them be seen going out of their way to hurt a competing operating system is not really helpful from an anti-trust perspective.'
Microsoft owns office, if they dont want to continue development for OSX, they dont HAVE to do, its their own choice.. what if azureus stopped supporting osx and linux os's... would that allow azureus to be sued under anti-trust laws?
portfolio
My bet is that this agreement with Microsoft is a stopgap for Apple while they are waiting for Microsoft to get their open XML document formats passed through the Ecma standardization process. Once this open format is available, Apple is free to release their own full office suite including a spreadsheet that will read and write fully MS Office Windows compatible documents. Remember Apple did support the Microsoft announcement for an open Microsoft XML document format?
Another thing is of course that Microsoft Office 2004 for the Mac in general is a very nice package despite the shortcomings in Entourage. One also have to remember that Excel was born on the Mac, and a lot of Mac users cannot live without it.
The future is in beta
Yet Windows Media Player and MSIE will no longer be offered... interesting...
They offered it long enough to convince content creators that deploying a media site based completely on WMP was a platform neutral decision, since a player existed for Mac. Once MS felt they proliferated that market to a satisfactory extent the plug was pulled.
Ross Ho's presentation at MacWorld was the epitome of mediocrity. She was totally non-enthusastic and either reading off a teleprompter or cue cards, with seemingly inappropriate posture at times. It was similar to watching a 15 year old girl present her high school research paper to the class. If a company is truly 'committed' to a platform why do they send out their least capable speaker? On top of that, she totally failed to discuss the cancelation of WMP for Mac, and address why the Flip4Mac solution was going to be a sound decision (i.e., ensure that MS was working with the developers to provide codec improvements in the future).
The MacBU hasn't done shit in about four or five years for the Mac platform, aside the migration of Office to OS X and one update. As it stands, the Mac version of Office performs horribly compared to its PC counterpart. How many of you can type faster than MS Word for Mac can spellcheck, on say a 1ghz machine? Pathetic. Right to left support has been in the Windows versions of Office since 1997 -- almost 10 years ago. Where is it in the Mac version? Why is it a pain jut to scroll through a 100 page Word document on a 800mhz Mac when it feels fine on a lowly 400mhz or less PC?
Since the MacBU acquired Virtual PC they've done virtually nothing with it, aside from getting SP2 to work with it. In the midst of Apple's transition to intel Ross Ho didn't even bother to talk about Microsoft's future plans for VPC on the Mac; one would think that's pretty important.
What did she discuss instead? A new version of Messenger. A new fucking version of Messenger. Who cares.
Seriously, what has the MacBU been doing for the past 5 years besides making incremental updates to Office? Absolutely nothing. The MacBU only exists to skate around anti-trust laws and milk Mac users for Office licenses. Their existence is convenient now, but in the long run they're just a disservice, locking Mac users into proprietary formats and ensuring Office's continued dominance in the form of cross-platform compatibility.
From TFM in Office 2004:
you don't have installed on your computer. If you open a presentation that uses fonts that you don't have installed on your computer, Microsoft PowerPoint substitutes fonts that you do have. For maximum compatibility when you create a document, use fonts that are common to most computers.
A search of TFM turned up NOTHING about embedding fonts except to check the compatibility report. Nada. For the record, I was using Arial AND one of the templates that comes with Office 2004. I didn't do anything fancy with the fonts.
Office 2004 runs just fine under Rosetta. It doesn't feel any slower than it did on a low-end G5 to me...and the dual core yonah systems are faster than the last ones that were being used.
In other news, Microsoft encourages consumers to choose Windows 3.1, whilst emphasizing the coming collaboration with IBM on OS/2 as the future OS for business users.
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
MS Office formats stay an industry standard? Duh
WMP and MSIE are operating system components - surely you don't expect Microsoft to help Apple write their operating system? ;-)
More seriously, it might be possible that they are anticipating the same thing that Cringeley predicted for 2006 (extract from Slashdot discussion here).
It's my opinion that Microsoft are aware that, as more and more devices may effectively be defined to be computers, Windows is in danger of losing its ubiquity. If, in future, they are to make money from a services model, then they need a vehicle to extract this money. They have been talking about the wonderful web services Office will provide for some years now. Better to maintain their customer base in Apple-land now than to try to win it back from competitors in the future.
Anyway, if they don't maintain some contact with Apple, how will they be able to keep track of what they're doing?
Microsoft provides Office on Mac, Apple supports Word XML in ECMA. Seems like a reasonable deal to me.
A new font in OS X does not mean a reboot. You might have to re-launch the app, but that's it.
MSDNAA is not free by any stretch of the imagination. It comes out of your major fees or tuition. It costs the school money, so they pass the price on to you. But it gets advertised to the students like, "Hey, wow! Free MS software!" It's only free in that you don't pay when you pick it up. Based on the percentage of eligible students who check out the MSDNAA software in my department, I would wager that MS gets the same amount per copy as they do retail, or at the least, damned close to it.
A year ago, If you had told me that I would be typing this on a Mac Powerbook, I would have told you that you was out of your mind. Now I enjoy OSX, And I painfully submit to my windows based PC's, and graciously do both without a lot of fanfare and complaint. There is a lot that both platforms offer, and more and more people are realizing this. Thus more and more people are becomming 'dual users'.
I feel the exact same way, except I only submit to using Windows with great fanfare an loud voiced complaint. Thankfully the Windows techs at work have a good sense of humor and shoot back with great relish whenever they have to log onto a Linux box. They even managed to squeeze out a chuckle or two when I referred to the Windows logon window as the 'Black gate of Mordor'. The next day I had an OS.X handbook on my desk duly fitted with a new cover labeled 'The Holy Bible'. Having fun at work is essential to enduring the boredom of it.....
Yep, Word and Excel were staples of 68k Macs long before their Windows counterparts.
In a sense it was the Mac that kept MS in the game as far as office suites. Their experience in writing GUI apps on the Mac gave them a great edge over WordPerfect and Lotus during the transition from DOS to Windows.
[overlooking the word 6 debacle]
I wonder if within the agreement is that Apple must (continue to) not pass any resources in creating a native Aqua port of Open Office.
Microsoft's problem is that Apple could fairly easily make a smoking, open, cross-platform office suite just by taking OOo and giving it a hot little Aqua outfit and applying some of that Apple secret sauce, just like they did with KHTML and Safari. In fact, I wouldn't be surpised if they've already done that as a back-up plan, just like their Intel port of OS X. If such a critter was ever released, it would probably just be bundled with the OS for free, since it's free software to start with. A quiet little demo of this project with the Microsoft rep would be all that it takes to ensure that MS keeps supporting Office-Mac until the end of time.
On a personal level he has been a fan of the Mac since before it was released, when Apple showed it to him to try to sell MS on producing software for it. It's well documented(1) that during the early development of Windows he rode the team with comparisons to the Mac. It's been rumored that he keeps a current Mac in his office.
No doubt there are many good business reasons to keep Office around, but it also seems Bill just honestly likes Macs. They're high-quality and fun to use. A lot of geeks like Macs, and we all know what a geek Bill is. And, imagine how interesting it must be to him to use a computer and OS that he had no hand in developing.
(1) See Barbarians Led By Bill Gates for instance
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Both Apple and MS gain by this deal.
MS Office is as close to a industry standard as anyone can come to. Wherever i go with my iBook, i need to open Word documents, read PPTs, etc., and even though Apple Works and Pages and Keynote could handle the job, invariably there comes a time when opening an SAD of 376 pages with indexes, tables, etc., is simply done only by word.
Obviously the first question i get asked in corporates: But does it run MS Office?
With MS support for next 5 years iam guaranteed i can use my iBook for editing those word documents at home and show wonderful presentations at work edited in Keynote+Powerpoint.
Gives time to Apple to build a better suite, and gives MS an opportunity to get Anti-trust off their backs: "See, we make software even for the 'losing' platform!"
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
I use office for mac on the office a lot, i dont want it to disappear like explorer or wmp did. One of the features i like on office for mac is that I find it more secure than its sister in windows. Why is this? is it because osx is more secure than windows or is it the programming in Office for mac is tighter?
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
PowerPoint was also born on the Mac.
On many (non-Linux-specific) sites it's up to 25% of the visitors. And counting! And how many of the "MSIE" users are running Opera, Safari or Konqueror (or in fact FireFox) with it permanently set to ID itself as MSIE?
Microsoft are supporting MS-Office on the Mac, because they can no longer afford to lose to any Open Source application, anywhere, ever. Which basically means that they're completely doomed, probably sooner rather than later, as their gargantuan cash-flow dips below the threshold needed to support their antisocial habits.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
> and by loyal I mean "did not bail when Apple's star was dimming at various times in the past"
Actually, they put out a shitty version of Mac Office in 1994 and left it on the market for four long years while Windows 95 succeeded in dominating consumer computing. Oh, and they only replaced it with Office 98 after Apple sued them, settled, and Steve Jobs gave Bill Gates credit for "saving Apple".
I'm not denying that MS has been an Apple supporter, but they did withhold new versions of Office during those dim days.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I don't like MS-Windows. I've optioned it up to the eyeballs to make it half as livable as a Linux desktop and it still falls short. All the time mouse-to-keyboard-and-back. The touchpad scrolling only works with certain apps. I have to chase all over the web to find apps that are halfway reliable, safe and useful. So I don't like MS-Windows for having a crappy user experience.
And on this laptop it won't drive the wireless LAN card reliably (trashes about every 10th web page load), whereas Linux runs the link absolutely rock-steady. XP fails to restart fom hibernation occasionally, and often wakes up kind-of-asleep; that is, it resumes from cold into a semi-hibernated states and needs another nudge to really wake up. So I don't like MS-Windows for being unreliable.
Pity the manufacturer botched the ACPI DSDT, because something about it panics Linux about every two hours. If MS-Windows didn't exist, the laptop manufacturer would have to pay more attention to Linux, and this crap wouldn't happen. So I don't like MS-Windows for elbowing aside everything else, either.
Finally, I don't like MS-Windows because if I don't fix the DSDT before I put this thing on a public network, I'm going to need an intrusive an annying firewall to further degrade my user experience, plus a virus scanner of similar character -- neither of which, needless to say, are requirements for running Linux. So I don't like MS-Windows for being so rickety that you need to constantly prop it up.
Finally, I don't like the XP which came with the laptop for costing as much as a long-life battery or doubling the RAM. Looked at another way, if the laptop hadn't come with XP, the ACPI would be standard so it worked reliably with everything instead of just one OS, and I could have had a choice of upping the RAM from 512MB to 1024MB for free, or adding a 4.5-hour battery pack to the existing 3-hour battery pack.
Notice that there were zero religious issues in the above list, they are all practical reasons for detesting MS-Windows.
If you do like MS-Windows, there's a good chance that you have no clue about what you're really missing. So really, you can't even speak for yourself because you haven't really made a decision, you only like it because you've never been seriously exposed to any of the better alternatives.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
...that the crappy AOpen laptop that this one replaces has never had MS-Windows on it, and has never been crashed by software (even having the CPU fan fail only shut it down). If I hadn't had to glue a replacement fan to the outside of it to make it work and spend ~AUD$300 on a replacement battery that would only last 3.5 hours on a good day to make it portable, I wouldn't have bothered with a replacement.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Dunno about getting you mod status quickly but after a little while that recipe will get you mod points at least weekly, usually every day or two. That happened to me essentially by accident, since I don't give a flying fandango how ignorami react to what I post and it turned out that a lot of people like it.
Then if you stray into a forbidden topic, post anything that sounds like it's from the wrong political party, casts to much doubt onto the Holy Creed of Evolutionism, could be construed as racist, gender-biassed et al if you squinched up your eyes just right (I have friends from all cultures, races etc), something which mocks conventional cosmologies, or pick any one of a dozen or so categories that I regularly trespass in, and sooner or later somebody will gather his furry little mates together and declare a jihad against you. Your posts will be moderated into the ground left and right, regardless of their value or topic (it's actually worse if they're good posts, because then they got modded up and down a lot, the nett effect being that you lose more points than if you started at 2 or 3 and simply lost them), and your buffer of 50 karma points will dry up like polystyrene before a blowtorch. Within hours, your account will be blocked from posting, and will remain that way for a random number of weeks. The administrators will refuse to do anything about that, despite your karma having been jammed against the stops since about six months after SlashDot opened their doors (I was up over 280 points when they put the karma cap on). You will be treated worse than a convicted sex offender (in fact, same would probably get modded up for sharing his "interesting" experiences).
It will take about a month after your account is unlocked again to first get mod points, then business as usual.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I do wish someone would write BorderArt and WordArt clone plugins plus an MS-Publisher import filter for OpenOffice Writer so that we could all forget MS-Publisher ever existed. Other than the "art" features, OOWriter seems to do pretty much everything that MS-Publisher ever did, only with stability and accuracy.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
With Apple's introduction of the MacBook, I think we now know why M$ was willing to continue support of M$Office on OSX. In its current hardware rendition, the MacBook uses EFI instead of BIOS for its low-level firmware. No x86 version of Windows available today includes support of booting up on an EFI system. EFI is currently used in some Itanic systems like the HP Integrity. Thus, although you can go out and buy a copy of OSX that will boot up on an existing Windows system (for which the hardware vendor has already paid M$ the Windows tax), but you can't install Windows on a MacBook. If this trend continues with the rest of Apple's new line, it creates two important facts on the ground: you can only run OSX on Apple's computer, and you can replace Microsoft's OS with Apple's (although unsupported as of this writing) on a lot of systems on Microsoft's HCL. Mind you, Windows Vista will support bootup on an EFI-equipped system, since that's supposed to be the wave of the future. I think Bill and Ballmer are worried that Jobs could create even more headaches for them with something as simple as providing a limited degree of support for OSX on existing systems, say something like "Apple will support OSX use on non-Apple x86 systems, if you have purchased Apple x86 systems for your site, too". All this, while his systems continue to be invulnerable to a counterattack, e.g. Bill saying "Microsoft will unlaterally add the Apple x86 systems to our HCL".
IIRC Microsoft agreed to actively develop Office for OS X for 5 years as part of negotiations where Apple agreed to not ship Netscape Navigator as the default web browser.
Mac Office revenues may be small relative to MS-DOS. But its still a huge market, its like stealing candy from a baby.
For the life of me I can understand the business logic of avoiding the even large Linus market. It seems to be illogical and emotional of "starve your enemy". Since both Mac and Linus are variants of UNIX, it shouldnt be too hard.
The products you're talking about are not. The Mac IE team was a subset of the IE team and set to working on IE for embedded Windows after v5.5. Mac WMP was supported by the WMP team that no longer wants to support the Max. Killing off these programs doesn't really say anything to Microsoft's commitment for the Mac BU.
"Now, back to the original article, who the hell is Directions on Microsoft [directions...rosoft.com]? And, more importantly, what do they have to gain from authoring and publishing Microsoft's Top 10 Challenges for 2006 [directions...rosoft.com]? " Directions on Microsoft is is most definitely NOT owned or editorially influenced by Microsoft. It is a well established and respected journalistic/research tank solely devoted to analyzing Microsoft. If their was a whiff of MSFT influence their reputation would be toast. So many people depend on quality information about Microsoft that there is a market for it! IBM and other large companies also have dedicated independent newsletters without the usual fluff and BS of consumer-level journalism.