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.'"

Comments

Students often get steep discounts

[Jim in Buffalo]

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.

Try 1.2 Beta

[soullessbastard]

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